Zanu PF and that Luis Suarez bite
OUTSIDE LOOKING IN: A letter from the diaspora
By Pauline Henson
Watching a grown man sink his teeth into another man’s arm on the football pitch in the UK was a reminder that nursery behaviour doesn’t end with adulthood.
The player in question will apparently be sent on an ‘Anger Management’ course and banned for the next ten games; football’s equivalent of the parental “Go to your room”!
Childish behaviour is not limited to footballers, politicians also revert to tantrums from time to time. The most typical example is to blame someone else when things go wrong, the “It’s not my fault” reaction that every parent hears when they adjudicate a childish squabble.
In Zimbabwe, Zanu PF is particularly prone to this immature response: never accept responsibility for your own mistakes, always find someone else to blame.
Faced with SADC’s insistence that the GPA must be fully implemented with regard to security reform, Patrick Chinamasa has responded with the comment that “SADC has no right to impose anything on Zimbabwe.” That’s the equivalent of the teenager’s “You can’t tell me what to do”!
Perhaps someone should remind the Minister of Justice that his party was a signatory along with the MDC to that very agreement that brought a Government of National Unity into being.
The Herald, Zanu PF’s mouthpiece, alleged this week that Simba Makoni committed treason when he said in an interview broadcast on a South African news channel that “all was not well in Zimbabwe”.
If that is treason, then every one who attempts to analyse the situation in Zimbabwe honestly is guilty of the crime. Those Zimbabweans who have fled to South Africa because, they say, there are no jobs in their home country are presumably also treasonous?
Facts must be faced and the truth is that it is one of the Unity government’s failures that they have been unable to create jobs; Bulawayo is a case in point; with its once vibrant manufacturing sector virtually dead, where are those workers going to find jobs?
The answer is obvious: they must go elsewhere in search of work.
Even more pressing than the shortage of jobs is the shortage of food. For a whole variety of reasons, the grain Marketing Board silos are empty or as the African Development Bank put it “the country’s grain reserves are severely depleted.”
The desperate shortage of maize meal means the price of the precious food stuff has risen as the selfish merchants increase their prices. The good of the country is not their concern, profit is their only motive and that makes their behaviour treasonous in my book.
With statistics indicating an increase in extreme poverty, hunger is the inevitable consequence. While the politicians squabble like naughty children and blame each other for all that’s wrong in the country, the situation continues to deteriorate.
Instead of focussing on the plight of the hungry masses now, the politicians are concentrating all their attention on the future and the elections, that’s how they keep their jobs after all. Hardly a day goes by without someone calling for peace and tolerance in the run-up to the polls but hunger is rarely in the headlines.
There is clear evidence that food aid is being manipulated right now for political purposes. In drought-prone villages in Mat North and the Midlands, people are once again being forced to buy Zanu PF cards to get food aid.
The fact that the Government spent a mere $50.000 on schools last year compared to $50 million on foreign trips suggests that some politicians have their priorities wrong.
Yours in the (continuing) struggle, Pauline Henson.
