“Ask and whatever you ask shall be granted to you,” the Bible says. What would YOU ask for? I know exactly what I would ask for.
I would ask that my mother was alive. It is more a wish really; for she passed away in the small hours of 22 nd August 2008. Death, any death, is hard to accept for us mortal because of its finalistic nature. What makes her death that much more difficult for me is that if Zimbabwe’s health service had not completely collapsed she could well be alive!
She was admitted in a private Hospital unconscious and she had fought for her live for five days. In her state, in this day and age she should have had a whole battery of equipment to monitor and, if necessary, assist her vital organs. The only help she had was a drip. She is not the only; there are hundreds of thousands of other Zimbabweans who have suffered and died unnecessarily.
Death and suffering are the daily companions of every Zimbabwean young or old, peasant or ruling elite- not even the Chefs, have escaped untouched that has befallen our country, Zimbabwe. If the clock can be turned back to April 1980; collective “YES PLEASE!” would be heard in Heaven itself!
If the clock was turned back to April 1980; what is there to stop the country going down exactly the same path and ending up exactly where we are today? Or to put differently; do we understand what we did wrong in the last thirty years landing us in this mess? Even with the benefit of hindsight, we still do not understand the simple a b c d of what we have done to land us here. Just because we are at the coal face of this human tragedy does not necessary mean we understand the cause and effect behind the tragedy. A cow dying of thirst would understand her need for water but not associate her situation with breaking the water trough herself.
The farmer will not only to replace the water trough but to build a barrier round it to stop the cow breaking the trough again. The Lord gave us a beautiful country with its fair share of natural wealth and, like every other human in all the other countries, with the intellect to choice what is wrong and right for ourselves. For the last thirty years we choice the ruinous path out of our own free will. The Lord did NOT going to build a barrier to stop us going down this path nor will He build one now.
Mugabe made the whole nation take leave of its human intellect faculties. He used the carrot and stick but now that all his bribes have turned to ash all the suffering he could inflect has turned to flea-bit compared to the nightmare Zimbabweans are facing today. If the nation had learnt anything at all then this whole sorry story would never lasted so long – thirty years – and the whole nation dragged to such depth of depravity!
Even now, in the dying days of the Mugabe dictatorship, we have not learnt anything from the tragic years of Mugabe. Yes of course, the nation has stopped giving Mugabe the same blind and unquestioning support it did in back in 1980s and before. We stopped giving it to Mugabe only to give the same blind and unquestioning loyalty to Morgan Tsvangirai. MDC’s sheer incompetency is as much responsible for the Zimbabweans’ continued in the last year as Mugabe himself. MDC is responsible for letting Mugabe off the hook by signing the power sharing deal and letting Mugabe drag out the whole process for his own selfish again. Very few Zimbabweans have had nothing else but praise for Tsvangirai. To them, he is infallible – here we go again!
My wish for 2009 is: to my mother and the hundreds and thousands of all the Zimbabweans who passed away in 2008- many of whose suffering and death could have been prevented- may you all rest in peace. And as for living, may the Lord help us see the sense of taking off the lens caps to our minds which we have collectively kept firmly screwed on!
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