Will rise
Ruthless Dictators
Psychological spectators
In this drama
Unmoved by a white mama’s cry
As she watches
Her farmer son die
Murdered by misled youths
Was veterans my ass
They pour on the land
Like leeches on my black skin
Sons of thieves
With government guns
They kill with no remorse
I feel a sense of lose
We can never be
What we were
When we were a people
Years from now
Our children
With tears in their eyes
Reflecting on our history
A sad story
From my heart
I am truelly sorry
For my brothers killing the farmer
They are blinded by greed
So they commit evil deeds
Oneday the spirit of the dead
Will rise
Bring misery to the nation
And their future generations
Investing in an ageing society in Zimbabwe
IT IS UNDISPUTABLE THAT the value of older persons for society is strong and society should rely increasingly on the strong social experience and wisdom of older persons. It is true that the social clock never stops ticking and therefore aging is a natural process. Of paramount importance in Zimbabwe, are the issues affecting old people, their plight and creating an enabling environment through which family members are positioned to provide more for older people. In traditional Zimbabwean culture, elderly care was provided by adult children, who gave all the care and support to their ageing and frail parents, but due to economic hardships, this may not always be possible. During recent years Zimbabwe has faced acute economic challenges which have caused societal shifts in living arrangements and family structures and therefore ageing poses a challenge in Zimbabwe. Read more
Stop! Thief!
I hate thieves. There’s nothing like working hard to get something that you really want, valuing it with the sweat that it’s worth, and then having someone come along with the audacity to snatch it away from you with their grimy hands. No doubt we’ve all had a share of this experience at some point in our lives: our money, our property, our livelihoods – all stolen from out of our unsuspecting grasp. Unfortunately, I too have a recent example of an act of robbery against me to tell.
Just this Saturday, I was a victim of a theft I believe was induced by the sorry desperate state of our nation and its people. After an excruciatingly long week of hard toil at work, I decided to treat myself by buying a six-piece box of fried chicken from a popular take-away chain that recently slashed its once over-inflated prices.
“You’ve earned it,” I thought to myself, imagining how good the food would taste back home, once shared with family.
After the characteristically long wait in the take-away queue, I made my way through the Harare city streets, quite excited about my recent acquisition – it’s not everyday that people in Zimbabwe buy take-aways, you know! Wanting only to get home and feed my own hunger, I thought nothing of the voracious pairs of eyes I noticed lustfully undressing the maroon box in my hands. But, as I stood along a wide-tarred street, waiting for the traffic to thin out, my worst fear was realised. Noticing that my concentration was more on the road than anything else, a man in dirty clothes simply came up behind me, snatched my box of chicken, and then ran like his life depended on it. Read more
Can a fiscal policy possibly curb the inflation in our heads?
The better part of last year saw me living in a secluded place where life is still relatively easy but not necessarily unharmed by the current economic melt down. Yes this is Zimbabwe! The one reason for this is that we are very close to the Botswana border where we get our groceries cheap using our parents’ hard earned forex they send monthly to support their kids in college. Although life is okay, the area is so secluded and the only news about the outside world is through over exaggerated satellite and internet news coupled with the toned down stuff our parents told us via email or telephone. Frankly, none of this prepared me enough for the shock of a life time when I set foot in Harare.
When Reserve Bank governor, Gideon Gono introduced the forex shops we were all relieved at least inflation was going to be past, our prices would be realistic and a lot of goods were going to be readily available on the shelves a slight return to the pre-land redistribution era. Every Zimbabwean was ready to sacrifice the little forex their Diaspora relatives had sent them. But alas, this was just another distant Zimbabwean dream. Read more
Your vocabulary can feed the hungry
What if just knowing what a word meant could help feed hungry people around the world? Well, at website called FreeRice it does. Go to the site, and you’ll see a word and four definitions. Choose the right meaning and the site’s advertisers will donate 10 grains of rice to the World Food Program, a United Nations agency that is the world’s largest humanitarian organization. Keep on guessing (the quiz gets progressively more arduous, not to mention vexatious), and for each correct answer 10 more grains of rice will head to people who need it. Now, admittedly, 10 grains is a piddling amount. But the totals have grown exponentially. Over 56 billion grains of rice have been donated to date through this innovative program.
If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.
-Mother Teresa
- Kubatana.net
Can the media stop prostitution?
Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness-Leviticus 19:29
I don’t think it is news to any Zimbabwean that the crisis that has engulfed our nation has seen a rise in prostitution. Yet the media seems to think it should be news. Time and time again, the pages of the few remaining papers will have some account of these women who feel they have no choice but to sell their bodies. We are told how they are afraid of AIDS, but fear the imminent death from hunger even more. Then, of course, the papers find something else to fill their pages with.
Yes, I am coming down on our media! It is deplorable, this morbid fascination with a social evil and the victims of it that makes little effort to illicit at least our sympathy let alone motivate us to want to do something about it. Interviews with a couple of prostitutes, a generous supply of directions for those who don’t know where they can procure the services of these women and how much it will cost and a statement from a pastor nobody has ever heard of only leaves me wondering what the aim in printing such a story was. Read more
