But it spread wider and earlier last Wednesday. You couldn’t find any vendors from Musika all along Ardbennie Road at lunch time, when Mbare usually bustles with activity. I had to wait till almost 3 o’clock before I could buy a single cigarette, and when I did, people could only say they had been to some rally ‘against sanctions’ but they didn’t know what sanctions.
Some of the youngsters didn’t seem to know what sanctions were, but they saw someone seemed to be trying to stop them doing business on a working day. Maybe that’s what ‘sanctions’ mean.
Being old enough to remember when we really did have sanctions, I suspect that another dose might be a good idea. Then, ‘sanctions’ meant that the United Nations passed a resolution banning all its members from trading with Rhodesia as long as it was called Rhodesia. Apartheid South Africa didn’t obey, but even so we could see the effects.
Commercial farmers couldn’t sell their tobacco, so they grew maize instead. Feeding your family sadza became much cheaper. The cost of living of the poor dropped 10% between 1965 and 1968 as compared with that of the rich. That helped show the racist regime that the world disapproved of them.
It also meant they had to ration what fuel they could get and could not buy all the weapons they wanted when the freedom fighters became more active. If somebody could really stop illegal sales of our diamonds now, our elected government might be able to govern.
But, in the meantime, we are given sleepless nights by gangs of youths toyi-toying around shouting about ‘sanctions’ they don’t understand and can’t explain but they are contributing to the continuation of their own poverty and oppression. A strange use of language!
And that’s not all. The Occupied Zone is plastered with pictures of their ‘revolutionary icon’ which, to my surprise, proclaim a message of ‘Peace, Peace, Peace’ and ‘No to violence’. That sounds a bit strange when the posters are plastered all over the council office that they trashed a month ago.
Maybe that is their strange way of saying they repent and they won’t do that sort of thing again. Maybe. Nobody is beyond redemption, so we should try to keep that faint hope alive. I must say that I would find that hope more credible if they stopped forcing people to attend their pungwes, stopped challenging anyone who moves in the Occupied Zone in the evening to repeat today’s slogan and if they stopped disrupting the efforts of ordinary decent people to earn an honest living.
Life is hard enough without their sanctions added to our burdens.
Post published in: Opinions