Becoming The Muse

If you were having coffee with me I would, as usual be happy to welcome you and thank you for visiting. I would offer you an apple and ask what sort of apple you like. They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away. There’s the green crispy ones, there’s the red ones, there’s apples of creation, then there’s the bad apples, the gangster apples, the no good, dark force apples…

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that the president made a statement on the situation in Zimbabwe and said that dark forces were responsible for our predicament, and we all need to be a bit more patriotic and peaceful, he also vowed to flush out the bad apples….

The state seems to be seeing only enemies and dark forces where it should be seeing citizens.

But who exactly are these bad apples are they a 22 year old university student who was arrested in Kariba for allegedly insulting President Mnangagwa by posting a message on WhatsApp group criticising him for lacking patriotism over his televised address to the nation? She is currently out on bail.

Are bad apples a 23 year old woman from Bulawayo who was abducted and sexually assaulted by alleged state agents because they wanted to find her activist uncle… Is the dark force a 22 year old nephew to an investigative journalist who was abducted and tortured for over 2 days…

If you were having coffee with me I would tell you that the ZimbabweanLivesMatter hashtag has been trending as a cry for help on the human rights crisis that is in Zimbabwe especially now as Covid is used as a way of clamping down on civil liberties. On the health front, the Vice President is now also the Minister of Health and lets not forget that once upon a time he fired all the health workers…

Some might say social media gives a disconnected representation of what’s going on the ground, but who will speak truth when you have those afraid to take a stand and those who benefit from the situation and then there’s those whose job is to spin the truth.

Here are just a few of the constitutional rights we have in Zimbabwe. All of which have been violated by the state in the last few days:

•Freedom from cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment – section 53
•Right to privacy – section 57
•Freedom to demonstrate and petition – section 59
•Freedom of expression and of media – section 61
•Rights of an accused person – Section 70
You can read the full rights here https://zhrc.org.zw/your-rights/

The South African state is set to send an envoy to Zimbabwe to find out what’s going on, and at first the state was against being prefected by another government but now it turns out the delegation being sent consists of sympathisers of the state, so their objectivity is already questionable as the ruling party of South Africa the ANC is agreeing with ZANU PF that the revolutionary parties in Africa are being targeted by erstwhile colonisers working with opposition parties to cause discord among sister parties to undo the gains of independence…

If you were coffee with me I would tell you that I am sure there’s a measure of truth to that but these revolutionary parties seem to have also created a corruption riddled patronage system which can take a fair share of blame for the predicament we are in…

The government is set to do a $3,5 Billion payout to compensate the white settlers who were dispossessed during the land reform… The money is not to compensate for taking back the land but for improvements that were done to the land and infrastructure. It makes sense but maybe the ones who acquired the farms should be first in line to pay for the improvements they have been enjoying instead of the full bill being burdened on all taxpayers whilst only a few select elite actually have the land and keep getting generous benefits and farm mechanisation grants which they never need to pay back.

The president recently presided over the relaunching of Anjin diamond mining operation in Chiadzwa.

The diamond operations activities had been stopped in 2016 after they could not account for the diamond revenue, the figure of $15 billion worth of diamonds was quoted as having gone “missing” although that is an unsupported figure, the fact remained there was no accounting of the diamond revenue, cant say I am confident any of this will benefit the state in its entirety but maybe they may surprise us. Our all-weather friends and the state would never let us down, right?

If you were having coffee with me I would tell you SADC has a virtual summit coming up and maybe statesmen to statesmen they can talk peace and security

The Namibian government through its international relations ministry released a statement on the Zimbabwean situation saying they will follow SADC protocol (which seems a lot like silence) although ironically in the not too distant past they have commented with great concern on events in America…

If you were having coffee with me I would tell today we celebrate Heroes Day to commemorate the lives lost in the struggle for independence… I  don’t think they died for things to be the way they are now.

So what’s going in your neck of the woods?… My blog turned 7 ^_^

~B