NO LONGER AT EASE.
By Wisdom Mumera.
Harare, Zimbabwe. (News Of The South) – The Indigenised Merriam-Webster of Zimbabwean Terms.
No Longer at Ease is a column that focuses on issues and topics that make you fret, smile and squirm. The last dictators standing, though on cracked heels and creaking backs; the Pope’s ever-widening embrace (now reaching gays and divorcees); the evolvement of African politicians (into starched – Hitlers with no moustache and multiple derangements); global warming and other sexual fantasies you wish to carry out.
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At the far southern end of the African continent one country is going through a nightmare it never thought existed on 18 April 1980. Then, the whole nation was a squirming mass of orgasmic nerve endings, unleashing feelings of joy at realizing freedom.
36 years after that day, the scenario is of a flaccid people resigned to everything. Most of their demonstrations are lone-man picketing power brokers with plastic placards and the hunger for a stray BBC camera, whilst their opposition politicians are mainly lawyers with
plenty of other things to do.
Zimbabwe has been going through times of political and economic attrition which have worn-off many of its ilk. Once upon a time it was a one party state. (Of course you can dispute the factuality of this but Zimbabwe has the unenviable ability of having divergent facts existing parallel to each other in harmony such as that of ZimStats’ 11% unemployed against another fact of 90%).
These divergent facts allow all sides of the political fraternity to stand on podiums and defend their positions with righteous zeal and enough moral indignation against the other guys.
It is in this environment that a number of words have lost their meanings and become patronized harlots turned over and around for any position and style.
The ruling party, ZANU PF has managed to implant new meanings into words such that they have lost their true meaning.
Indigenisation in Zimbabwe means any historically supported and economically astute take-over of 51% stakes in foreign companies dealing in natural resources after they have set up operations.
The thinking is that the country has provided the most important factor, natural resources, so has the right to come in and be the majority shareholder. If you are against that you are a sellout; the last of the Rhodies and a non-progressive black quack with a skewed mindset programmed to work for someone till death.
The indigenisation programme has been stuttering around with numerous corrections being carried out. Recently the President had to wade into the murky swamp of what Indigenisation means when the Minister of Indigenisation in full black-advancement zeal leapt for a Banking industry takeover.
The whole affair has become a sordid action-on-the-go policy which has served to instil fear into prospective investors who are no longer sure what Indigenisation is really about, its boundaries and where it will wake up tomorrow.
Irate Dynamos football club supporters angered by their foreign import of a coach have been whispering about indigenizing the old club and doing away with the Brazilian.
Patriotism has all to do about loving ZANU and not questioning its brand of Zimbabwe not wistanding a deflationary economy, a comatose industry and a beehive CBD filled with vendors and touts. You don’t criticize the situation as that shows an absence of love for one’s
country. People who go about pointing out the deficiencies are opposition demagogues bred on virtual anti-stances over anything, including imported women panties and the erection of the President’s statue.
This definition has resultantly seen a drastic reduction in the number of those that can be sufficiently deemed as a patriots. Most can be found you know where.
They have no qualms about the lack of jobs, since their aim to create 2 million of the jobs has failed. Instead they have created 2 million vendors chased time and again by Municipal police in a parody play of the famous movie, BSAP Comes to Town.
Nationalists is another word. In Zimbabwe it implies those who fought the liberation battle, have fought opposition parties and are still fighting the citizens’ battle for a sane country.
They have remained foolishly steadfast in support of the former revolutionary party through the years when it has transmuted into a replica of the imperialists it supplanted.
It is such nationalists that are buried at national shrine. Only them.
Everyone else who thinks he is fighting for the nation from across the political divide can go create his own shrine in Manicaland and call it Shrine of the Shunned Heroes.
Hero in Zimbabwe means liberation war fighter, ZANU PF cadre since independence, government member, multiple farm owner since the land invasions and stoic anti-Westerner.
Resultantly heroes are nationalists and patriotic. They deserve statues and a burial at Heroes Acre. Heroes are also wanted during such times as this to give the rest of the ignorant masses lectures and reminders about what it meant running in the bush with an AK47, eating a whole cow alone as comrades and being an African mafia with a just cause.
Zimbabwe’s heroes are not individuals who have surmounted barriers to help the nation only. That they are yes, but they are also individuals who have done that and returned to support the ruling party through all its activities inhumane and quirky.
The Heroes don’t have free swinging minds, weighing issues and advocating the sane. They are simply resolute souls with fixed patterns of thought and judgements about all things, sexual and political.
Doesn’t matter Britain said let there be gays. The Hero stands by his declaration, all gays go to hell.
Imperialists in Zimbabwe is all about the sexually warped nephews of Cecil Rhodes and their brothers from another land, America. They are the imperialists, the blood-sucking vampires who sanctioned a whole country for exercising its sovereignty and want to colonise it again through opposition parties.
One can be an imperialist by association too. Enemies also has a different meaning in the country. It’s not about a hated rival per se. It’s a normative term denoting the grouping of the Western axis of evil comprising Britain, America plus the local opposition parties.
They are the Enemies, in some cases clandestinely, and in others openly, fighting to reverse the gains of the liberation war.
As the country continues to suffer through its myriad challenges change appears to be coming slowly though as the ruling party members have begun bickering amongst themselves.
How soon that will be is a variable that can’t be pinned down. The only danger in that is, if that change is slow its meaning can be transformed too into something tectonic. Shifting the plates of meaning until the status quo becomes a change in itself.
A new type of change that the nationalists and heroes will beat us to support.
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