The only trouble was that they did not feel confident that they would complete the job. “We’ve only got police clearance to sweep from 8am till 2pm today,” they said.
Hold it there. Isn’t there something very wrong here? Why should anyone need police clearance to sweep their own streets? Haven’t we all got a right to health? Surely we have a right to clean our own streets, even if government can do the job? – and in this case, they clearly can’t. So by what right does an instrument of government claim to deny us our right to care for our own health?
There is something very wrong, and it doesn’t only affect those women. The young men who tried to clear rubbish earlier last week didn’t finish the job. It looks as if someone prevented them. What is going on?
And why don’t we protest more loudly? Don’t tell me it’s our traditional respect for authority. I’ve seen a chief order an extra chisi too many and at the wrong time of year. At 6am on the day, everyone was waiting in their doorway. When the first man showed how much respect that edict of the chief’s deserved, it didn’t take 10 minutes for everyone else to join him ploughing their fields. We could always react like that to unnecessary interference by those who claim to rule us.
Maybe when we got rid of our colonisers we made the mistake of taking their way of running their own country as a model of the kind of freedom and democracy we wanted to build? If so, we were badly mistaken.
Don’t you know that the British are the most spied-on and most regulated people on earth? They have closed-circuit TV cameras watching them everywhere, probably even in public washrooms. They only feel safe when Big Brother is watching them. And they don’t seem perturbed that their government doles out information more sparingly than their European neighbours.
We certainly need to be aware that all sorts of people are watching us, but we don’t need to like it or to obey them. We need to protest more vigorously at every abuse of power.
Like when a Supreme Court judge ruled last week that all the property of the Anglican diocese of Harare belongs to a man who very publicly left the Anglican church a few years ago. Don’t kid yourself that something similar can’t happen to your church. Even if it is so infiltrated that its congregations all sing from the Zanu (PF) hymn-book, you can’t be sure that some other chef won’t get ideas about acquiring its assets or its members’ votes.
Stranger things have happened to people who thought they were safe as owners of the farms they had been given in the last ten years – until some bigger chef was tempted to make a quick few bucks by taking the farm and selling its machinery and rich crops or fat cattle.
Post published in: Opinions