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It is Tuesday evening, Valentine’s Day and for some reason I find myself watching Oscar Pambuka’s Melting Pot. In the studio he has a two chaps discussing youth empowerment. One is – perhaps predictably –  from Upfumi Kuvadiki, that notorious anti-investment outfit that shares the same degenerate  ideologies as Mbare’s Chipangano vigilantes.

It reminds one of how so many things are wrong in this country where political instruction from the elders has moved from the very tenets that saw young men once upon time in 1912 form Africa’s oldest political movement, or what stirred Ndabaningi and his contemporaries as valiant young men to take up the fight for a greater good, yet you have to ask yourself what these Upfumis have in common with the Robert Mugabe of 1963. What place do they have in Zimbabwe’s political history other than tales of grief, tales of how they broke down the walls which other compatriots tried to build? Has it not been recorded that the coming into government of the firm hand of Tendai Biti “coincided” with the economic stability that eluded the Zanu PF elites for more than two decades? This is no way is to extol the abilities of any mortal, but the facts stare right back us.

The language of the Upfumis is about empowering the youth, giving them USD5,000 to start their own business, economic emancipation, and a new form of capitalism. If only this were true. At least Oscar Pambuka to his credit did ask about the abuse of the funds where the young patriots are reportedly using the funds to buy crappy chattels. But still rather predictably, an Upfumi Kuvadiki rep was quick to dispute this claim, going on and on about lies being told about young beneficiaries of this largess. I have said this before that Zanu PF has made extinct the spirit of hard work: youths now know only too well that hard work is an alien virtue; after all, they are from that amoral stock where killing people who do not agree with your political beliefs are indeed a virtue! Young people are being taught that all you have to do is line up on the Zanu PF ticket and claim the resources of the land as your own simply based on the name of Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF.

A rather daft university student said to me the other day he had been elected into the Zanu PF youth chairmanship of some sort, and I asked him if he believed all that nonsense that came with allegiance to the party of blood. All he had to say for himself was: “My friend, you never know. What we want is to eat.” I shut my ears as he continued talking. And you just have to see the people who speak on behalf of the youth: fat cheeks and arrogant mouths when we all know the penury the majority of young people here live with as they continue the dangerous trek to South Africa despite reports that their fellow countrymen are being shoved into the Black Maria and deported as personas non grata. That is not to mention hundreds of thousands who seek honest lives by enrolling for higher education only to be kicked out of classes because they cannot afford the extortionate fees. Small wonder then that for the soul-less types, taking over white-owned mines and other business concerns is too good an El Dorado to resist. You still have to ask yourself how this youth empowerment drive seeks to address these issues as obviously not all youths are anarchists who want to reap where they did not sow. These clowns are just obsessed with being wealthy but apparently have no clue how to get there without taking over what someone else built ages ago.  They obviously do not have the knowledge gleaned from Aesop’s fables and the wisdom of their own father about imaginary riches. A bunch of morons by any other name. But I know they read this and say: “screw you; we are claiming what rightfully belongs to us!”

Why now you bozos?

It got me thinking that Zimbabweans really are a special breed. They are great survivors. And their stories tell just that.
- Willie Tafadzwa Chinyamurindi writing in the Mail & Guardian

Made rounds in my old neighbourhood the other weekend and had a mini tour of the favourite haunts of the old boys. Still found the usual crowd and met some ladies I knew back then from the generation of my elder siblings. I knew them then as selling their souls to the Devil as some ultra-Purists would put it, no doubt to the ire of feminist writers and scholars – and Hon. Tabitha Khumalo even! I found them still at it, ostensibly enjoying lagers which they apparently liked hot because it seemed to take them hours to down a 330ml pint of their “favourite” booze! But then I learnt a long time ago that it is always easy to moralise about these issues and expose your own hypocrisy, yet it got me thinking about the dynamics of economics meets want, want meets disease and how we as mere mortals can tread that very thin line and come out of it all unscathed.

The thing is that I am one of many people who have over the years been diagnosing folks ailing from whatever ailment by just looking them. And the advent and eventual ubiquity of HIV/Aids became easy play for me and other such types. So it was here during my little pub crawl that I met these two ladies who this one time were at the centre of ghetto gossip that they were literally die-hard types seeing virtually all their friends and former lovers had succumbed to HIV/Aids. And the two were themselves at one time written off because of their poor health with every Simba and Saru seeming to be in the know that they each had one foot in the grave because they were visibly ailing “with all the signs of HIV/Aids.” Yet here they were looking as strong as horses and obviously loving the attention from the ogling eyes of all types – skinny tipplers with rapidly aging faces because of rabid gulps of undiluted spirits, and the pot-bellied types who seem to flaunt this rotund protrusion of their abdomens as a sign of living the life. But I figure living the lie is more like it! So as I stopped by for a chat, and naturally perhaps, they asked that I buy them a couple of pints of lager and I obliged, perhaps like people who last saw each other do. Just as I was placing the beers in front of them, a chap I knew back in the day as having gone to school with one of my older brothers came along carrying three pints of lager. Pleased to see him, I extended my greetings, but the chap was mysteriously peeved, pointing a finger at me with words like “wena mfana wena” which translates to “you young man, you better watch out.” Turns out he wasn’t concerned about my health seeing the company I was in! The three lagers were in fact for him and the two prostitutes! Turns out he was imagining I was muscling in on his action as the two laughed out and told him “no, no, no, he is our younger brother!”

This little incident got me thinking about the dynamics of HIV/Aids and how easily it spreads. If this chap was pissed off seeing me talking to these women, he surely knew that he had competition from other young men who couldn’t wait to take the ladies home for some good old hanky panky as soon as he took his eyes off them! I am a product of these mean streets where prejudice seems to be second nature, where sex and cash have a logic of their own, yet there are issues that remain etched in one’s mind that tend to present one as a sanctimonious prick even, yet for me, the greatest tragedy of our time is not HIV/Aids in itself, but how some individuals have come to accept HIV/Aids as an inevitable “gamble” every sexually active adult has to live with. Once upon a time as a naïve young man I thought I had all the answers to the world’s problems, now as a grown man with kids of my own, I take some time off to mingle with other adults and I wonder if my juvenile idealism still has a place at all in this cruel world. Am I moralising? Maybe. Am I worried what kind of world my three little boys will grow up in? Damn right I am! But what can I do? I just watch the world pass me by and muse “what if?”

~ Paul Auster, City of Glass

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