Luke-ing the Beast in the Eye: Of the cockroach theory and ED’s macabre imagery

By Luke Batsirai Tamborinyoka

In the middle of such a huge countrywide crisis, when a prudent government ought to be worried about the food situation, fuel, cash and power shortages as well as massive avarice and corruption at the centre of the national rot,  Mr Emmerson Mnangagwa told the nation that he was worried about the cockroaches in our kitchens.

He told a bemused audience in Gutu that very soon, there will be village health inspectors to inspect homes and people will be arrested for cockroach found in their kitchens.

Such is the mediocrity we are saddled with at the very apex of the nation.

And these now-frequent comic lines are no laughing matter, given the parlous state of the country!

It was Chinua Achebe who told us that a man does not chase rats when his house is burning, and for a President, even one who stole an election, to threaten the nation with arrests if cockroaches are found in their kitchens is akin to going after rodents when a whole house is on fire!

But first some valuable cock-roach lessons!

Cockroaches are a group of common insects in the order Blattodea and there are some 4,600 species of them. I have always told people that they are simply called roaches–and not cockroaches.

They all can’t be cock-roaches because they are a procreating species and if there are cock-roaches, there certainly must be hen-roaches.

Which means their actual name must be just roaches. It does not make sense to refer to the insects that you see as a cockroach as they all can’t just be male.

Those that we call cock-roaches could be hen-roaches!

There is what is called the cockroach theory, which is a market theory that states that when a company reveals bad news to the public, many more negative events may be revealed in the future. The term cockroach theory comes from the common belief that seeing one cockroach is usually evidence there are many more.

And indeed, when ED started his comic antics ever since he came into office with the coup of November 2017, there have been more bad news in terms of his comedies, most of which are in bad taste. I am not into movie production, having made my grounding as a print media journalist at one of the country’s leading daily newspapers in the late 1990s.

But I wish to make my debut in move production by launching the ED comic series in the run-up to the next election; a tepid collection of comic comments from this scarfed thespian who masquerades as a President.

The man is simply a village idiot.

His dry humour notwithstanding, I reiterate that he is the only dim-wit of a lawyer I have ever come across in my entire life. That is why I still maintain that he did not study law in Lusaka but could have undergone some para-legal training at one of the backwater colleges in the Copperbelt region of Zambia in the 1960s.

It is hard to imagine dimwit Dambudzo arguing a case in court. I even wonder how he managed to charm Auxilia into marriage, or his many rumoured concubines. Given his penchant for murder and violence, it is possible he simply points a gun at them and orders them to strip and give him their all! 

And given the way he just plunges into his mediocre dry lines, I do not even think the man is capable of any foreplay.

A politician who even can’t charm you with a creative line cannot purport to have charmed a whole nation of educated Zimbabweans into voting for him. Such characters can only lead people through the various manifestations of condign power, usually a coup.

Surely, for someone to have a fixation with kitchen cockroaches while the nation is on the brink of disaster is no laughing matter. Such mediocrity is simply astounding.

It could be, as some have suggested, that the man meant something more sinister. Through his cockroaches imagery, he probably meant MDC supporters. The last time the word was used in Rwanda, it caused a civil war and resulted in almost one million Tutsis being exterminated.

The word inyenzi (cockroaches) led to the slaughter of millions of Tutsis. The phrase “Weed out the Cockroaches” which in essence meant “Kill the Tutsis” was a macabre refrain during the civil war in Rwanda and Zimbabweans have every reason to be afraid when anyone makes reference to the word, which led to mindless blood-letting in Kigali.

Mnangagwa’s cockroach imagery, given his penchant for human blood, could have been a harbinger of ghoulish episodes to come.

In the logic of typical cockroach theory, Mnangagwa’s cockroach remarks could herald more State-engineered heinous acts in the near-future, which could spell doom for any prospects of peace and stability in the country.

So much for a cockroach theory for a cockroach regime.

Or is it not simply a roach theory for a roach regime?

Luke Tamborinyoka is the Deputy National Spokesperson of the MDC. He is a multiple award winning journalist and a former secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists.

He is an ardent political scientist who won the Book Prize for best student when he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science at the University of Zimbabwe. You can interact with him on Facebook or on the twitter handle @luke_tambo.