There are some of us who have entered 2012 with a sense of trepidation. They believe this is the year when a decadent earth will collapse into itself. I predicted the same for Zanu PF, but the earth? My bible says no one knows the day or the hour when the Son of Man will come. Meaning, make a living while the sun still shines.
Don’t listen to those who are creating a multi-billion dollar industry out of scaring people. There even is a movie entitled “2012” that portrays the destruction of the world as we know it. It relives mankind’s worst fears…earthquakes, floods, fires, the works. But then I ask, what’s new? We already have fair share of death and destruction… most of it man made. We have seen it all.
Mankind has become suicidal. We now swear by the motto “Live for today fas if there is no tomorrow.” Guess what? – to borrow Reserve Bank head honcho Gideon Gono’s favourite cliché – there is a tomorrow we all can look forward to. You might be flat broke today, yet tomorrow could be different. Just like the fingers on your hand, not all days are the same.The key is to have a deliberately positive attitude.
There are a lot of things that we will never understand. If we knew all of life’s secrets, we would hasten the end of the world as we know it selfish beings that we are. We are so destructively selfish that we do not care about the consequences of our actions as long as we believe we are not on the receiving end.
Take the fact that God has endowed Zimbabwe with unfathomable mineral wealth and a people who are supposed to be intelligent because, come to think of it, we run the world. Minerals that would easily take the country out of the rut it is in if the revenue found its way into the fiscus and not into someone venerated pocket.
Yet the nation is robbed blind in broad daylight by people whose preoccupation is to ensure that we marvel at how rich they are. We watch them with awe as they claim that they were not born poor.
There is nothing more treacherous than to personalise state resources with impunity and continue to perpetuate a crisis in order to pull wool over our eyes. We are in trouble as a country because there are those whose very existence is dependent on the status quo remaining as it is. They thrive on chaos.
There are things happening that defy logic. Air Zimbabwe, a pale shadow of its former self, is kept gasping in the Intensive Care even when a basic grasp of elementary economics tells us that it should be shut down. It has gone way below the status of a chicken bus operation. The only consolation perhaps is that they don’t allow one to enter the cabin with chickens and goats like used to happen on some airlines in West Africa.
Not that I don’t like goats and chickens. But there are depths that we cannot surely plumb if we claim to be more educated and intelligent than the next village idiot. We are tempted to believe that we are a country that celebrates mediocrity.
Reports of the aircraft that transported the president to the African Union summit filling up with smoke before take-off should have sent alarm bells ringing in close security circles. If it were in Idi Amin’s time, those responsible would have been fed to the crocodiles.
Worse still, the fact that engineers had to be lured from their lairs for a few pieces of silver to repair the plane reads like something out of a very dark comedy. I know of prominent people who have vowed never to fly Air Zimbabwe again even at gunpoint.
It remains a mystery why none of their planes have ever dropped out of the sky. Is it because of the fact that it takes 120 people to service one Air Zimbabwe plane? I bet that some of those duties would be to blow cockroaches from the aircraft’s avionics if need be. Aren’t we just embarrassed that the South African Taxi Association has managed to, or is about to launch an airline of their own?
This has been a submission by Lenox Mhlanga. If you have something to share, you too can become a Citizen Journalist by submitting your story here: Citizen Journalism by Living Zimbabwe.
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