Today is Workers Day or May Day; that special day when we pay tribute to the world’s working people—the rare breed of breadwinners in our communities that slugs it out under tenuous conditions to give meaning to the parlous lives of their children and other dependents.
Indeed, today is a special day on which we must all accord due veneration to those who sweat it out every day to impact the lives of their families.
Today, we salute those who toil every day to bring food on the table. We pay tribute to the working people in our communities—that special breed of both sexes that brings dignity to the sacred institution called family.
Sadly, in Zimbabwe, this day must assume a unique dimension as the working people—- especially the civil servants of our land—are slugging it out under very difficult circumstances, worsened by an inept government that does not care for its own workers, worse still for everyone else.
The university lecturers have had to down their tools to be heard by a deaf government in a decrepit country where unschooled but moneyed tenderpreneurs are shamelessly parading their filthy lucre—–dishing out expensive cars like confetti while our education and health delivery systems painfully groan for attention.
Meanwhile, as our collapsing socials services and the suffering workers groan for reprieve, the country’s clueless President remains indifferent as he roams around the country in the company of a tummied criminal and ex-convict, as we saw at the ZITF grounds in Bulawayo last week.
To the toiling civil servants of this land whose paltry wages can barely take care of their families, this is your day.
Special mention must go to the country’s teachers, nurses, doctors and others in the civil service who subsidize this inept government through side hustles to raise transport fares.
Today is your special day.
To the police and the disciplined members of our uniformed forces, this is your day.
To the ordinary suffering members of our uniformed forces, it is a public secret that your Commander-in-Chief has forgotten all about you.
Your leaders and the corrupt, criminal brigands around them are now concentrating on looting and salting away their criminal proceeds while you invest your honest sweat in protecting the security and integrity of this our beloved country, which is now “owned” by elite lootocrats who go by the moniker of Vene (the owners). .
To the very few workers still in formal employment, this is your day. We know you are working under very tough conditions to give some semblance of life to the fading heartthrob of our economy, a heartthrob that has now calcified into a barely discernible pulse.
To our informal workers that now constitute the bulk of the country’s “workers”, we salute you today.
Indeed, to the teeming millions by the roadside–the now booming informal industry on the country’s pavements and the various vending markets across the country, this is your special day.
You, the hustling informal workers of our country, have chosen honesty, integrity and chastity over grand crime, graft and avarice that have become the badge of dishonour of this kleptocracy; this government of thieves. .
Indeed, today we salute you, the informal sector, for choosing candour over transgression.
To the booming, hollering informal industry by the country’s roadsides—where everyone is desperately trying to sell something to someone at high pitch, this is your day.
You have gallantly chosen a life of hard work for your families.
We salute you.
To the toiling Zimbabweans abroad whose remittances are shoring up the nation’s depleted coffers, we salute you.
We appreciate your daily grind as you slug it out in faraway lands to give decency to the desolate lives of kinsmen and kinswomen back home.
Indeed, we salute you today.
To all the suffering mothers at home, all the single mothers, widows, widowers and those leading child-headed families who toil for their loved ones under very difficult circumstances, we can only give you your flowers today.
To the ZCTU and the many dedicated unions whose job is to defend and represent the toiling working people of this our cursed land, we accord you our salutation!
At a personal level, I strongly identify with this special day. It is a day that invokes memories of my previous life as a salaried worker; first as a journalist and later as an employee of a political behemoth.
As a journalist, I was overwhelmingly elected the secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists at a Masvingo hotel on a sunny Sunday afternoon in October 2002. That occasion baptized and marked my entry into the leadership of the working people of this country.
That election as a leader of the country’s journalists earned me a place in the general council of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, the country’s national labour union.
So I am a trade unionist to the bone-marrow and this special day for workers gives me goosebumps because I fully identify with its purpose and ethos.
Later, as a dedicated employee of a political party formed by the working people of Zimbabwe, I won the “Worker of the Year” award for three consecutive years. Therefore, I know how to grind it out with excellence of execution on the shop floor.
Today is therefore a day that strongly speaks to my personal spirit and conviction.
But while everyone else is toiling and working for a good purpose and patriotically contributing to the fiscus through a litany of direct and indirect taxes, there is this notably vile breed whose daily work is to loot, repress and increase the suffering of Zimbabweans.
Woe be unto all those who are working day and night to reverse the people’s sovereign will reposed in our national Constitution that we wrote ourselves and affirmed in a referendum in March 2013.
As a nation, today we collectively pray for the cursing of all those “working” to unconstitutionally extend the tenure of a non-working leader of a non-working government. .
Our collective salutation on this special day must go to all working Zimbabweans who have suddenly found themselves saddled by a non-working, corrupt government.
On their part, the majority of the citizens of this great country that we all love have chosen honesty and chastity as key values in whatever they do to feed and sustain their families.
We salute you Today is your special day.
To those we know whose only known “work” is to loot, kill, oppress and repress, all we can say is everything eventually comes to an end.
Chisingaperi chinoshura.
Luke Tamborinyoka is a citizen from Domboshava. By profession he is a journalist and a political scientist. You can interact with him through his Facebook page or via the X handle @ luke_tambo.
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