The South African Reserve bank has issued a new series of banknotes that personify South Africa’s former president Nelson Mandela. The new notes feature the image of former president Nelson Mandela on the front of the notes and, on the reverse side, images of South Africa’s Big Five – rhino, elephant, lion, buffalo and leopard. The denominations of the notes are 10, 20, 50 100 and 200.

Barack and Mitt rivals for the US presidency will never get to stay in the White House together but in Kenya they will live together. A young mother in Kenya has named her newborn twins Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Some have claimed the mum wants to bask in two-minutes of glory. Some speculate that Mitt will be bullied all his life. What are you views on this?

Imagine making monthly pension contributions for six years and when you try to claim your pension from your insurance company you get a $20 bill on the spot as a once off payment. I was reading with great concern an article published in The Herald of 9 November 2012 on the feud between pensioners and insurance companies. Pensioners in Zimbabwe continue to suffer in silence as insurance companies reap big. The economic meltdown orchestrated by the hyperinflation environment of the 2008 era gave insurance companies some reasons to get away with it. To say that contributions were wiped out by inflation without considering value of the policies pre-inflation era somehow is tantamount to day light robbery. Some of these insurance companies invested in immovable assets, which appreciate in value and for the record, these insurance companies’ own most commercial buildings in city centers and they charge exorbitant rentals.

The paltry payments are not even enough to foot the transport bill for an ordinary person traveling from Gwanda to Harare, where most of these insurance companies are located, to make a claim. With no source of income, and having reached retirement age, most pensioners are left with no option but to accept the peanuts on offer from the insurance companies. This daylight robbery also left depositors penniless when banks failed to account for depositors’ money after Zimbabwe began using the American dollar; up to now it’s still a blame game between commercial banks and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe.

The three Counselling Services Unit (CSU) staff who were arrested Monday in Harare and transferred to Bulawayo have finally been released on bail. They’ve been charged with causing malicious damage to property, and now have to report at Harare Central weekly pending trial.

A Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights statement reports:

According to State prosecutor Marlvin Nzombe, the three CSU representatives together with some unidentified individuals smeared some MDC graffiti on an information centre located in Mpopoma high density suburb in Bulawayo 07 October 2012 in contravention of Section 140 of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act. The State claimed that the CSU senior staff members inscribed the words “MDC” and “MDC Chinja Ndizvo” on a bill board and on a durawall surrounding the information centre.

Seriously? Three nights in detention over some graffiti. And graffiti that the people you’ve arrested clearly had absolutely nothing to do with?

Let me get this straight:

You raid my office, intimidate my clients, threaten us with tear gas, steal my computer, find some spray paint I bought in July, decide this MUST be the VERY SAME SPRAYPAINT used in Bulawayo in October, arrest me, lock me up for three nights, move me to Bulawayo in an open truck, handcuff me, take my glasses, and finally release me.

Whereupon I have to pay you $100, give you my passport, and am obliged to come see you in town every Monday for who knows how long.

All because someone in some city more than 350 kilometres from where I live sprayed some graffiti that you don’t like. Where is the recourse here? You mess me around for no apparent reason, and I have to pay you for the privilege of it?

Honestly. Even as I write it, it doesn’t make sense. You wouldn’t believe it if you read it in a book or saw it in a movie. So why do we let our police force indulge in such absurdity?

Two chaps from two totally different backgrounds found themselves back in Zimbabwe in the past couple of weeks.

One was a guy who toiled at the once glorious and well paying NRZ but left the misery of unpaid labour and headed for South Africa a couple of years ago. The other, a wise guy who has seen the world as a journalist, public relations guru, university lecturer and everything else in between and went to Botswana looking for a piece of that Khama wealth.

When the NZR guy came through, he had on his mind returning to his former job seeing he was missing home rather too terribly. He has some job in SA and looking at him, I thought he must be better off than he was back in the day as a railwayman.

He looked fit, his skin was “ruddy” and was generally clean, leading me to conclude that the grass sure must be greener on the other side. But here he was saying he had in mind settling back home and living the rest of his life to the fullest.

He made rounds to meet up with erstwhile work colleagues to get the pulse of what has been happening, who died, who got promoted, who left the country, who ran off with somebody else’s wife, you know the usual stuff old friends talk about.

That’s when his dream of a blissful return to the motherland disappeared.

His NRZ buddies told they hadn’t been paid literally for years and were only continuing with the humiliating and tedious trudge to work because they had nowhere else to go. If you quit this job, where the fuck are you going to get another one seeing it is only the streets doing the hiring? Bulawayo industries have become ghost towns, everyone who is unemployed is selling something, what are YOU going to sell? Thus it was decided that it was better to continue going to work for no pay because one day a miracle would happen and the NZR would give them a year’s salaries in back pay!

If only that were not the apotheosis of naivety.

You see, the railwaymen did not have to tell him he was better off in a foreign land: he could tell this himself, and all the dreams of working for the prosperity of his country disappeared. And so it was that as I write, he is buried in his work somewhere in South Africa working for that country’s prosperity!

Now, to the other fella from Francistown, Botswana.

This chap says he wanted to contribute to the growth of the Botswana economy by registering his outfit as a legitimate potential contributor to the GDP, but Batswana red tape got him steaming through the ears.

He says he was told it was difficult to see how his proposed business would contribute to the Botswana economy, and in frustration, he shook the dust off his sandals and returned to Zimbabwe, rather reluctantly it would appear.

And now back to the motherland, he has to start afresh and chase the American greenback by meeting all sorts of characters he never imagined he would ever meet. Because American greed has landed on these shores and claimed permanent residence, this chap has a lot of navigating to do before his fiscally immoral compatriots fleece him of his hard earned cash and get him on the move again, this time: DESTINATION UNKOWN.

Granted, this chap would rather share his skills with our neighbours where the pickings reportedly come in bucketfuls, but as the Fates would have it, he finds himself right where he started. Yet the two chaps present two narrative strands that converge somewhere on the rainbow. These are patriots who, all things being in order, would earn a living here, watch their children grow, watch them bring forth grandkids and just enjoy being sons of the soil.

But yet here they are as grown men running around chasing the Devil’s coin all over the show like horny cockerels chasing after pullets. There is a lesson there. You figure it out.