Where is our sense of Ubuntu?

A man is bludgeoned to death as happened to Mutedza — at a public shopping centre, on a Sunday afternoon and in full view of shoppers including children — and the rest of the country appears not bothered by such monstrous savagery apparently because there is really nothing unusual about one more death due to politics.

Those who seem to show concern about or disapproval of this abomination do so only because they see in Mutedzas tragic death an opportunity to score cheap political points. Indeed as we have seen Zanu (PF) doing, trying to use the murder to make the mud finally stick on the MDC-T whose supporters are accused of killing the policeman.

Zanu (PF) seems to see in Mutedzas death nothing more than an opportunity to portray their political rivals as the chief sponsors of violence in a cynical bid to seize the moral high ground ahead of this months regional summit on Zimbabwes political situation.

Meanwhile, the police come out bellowing war and murder against the killers of Mutedza, rounding up MDC activists and throwing them into jail – where they allegedly beat and tortured some of them, no doubt in a bid to extract confessions.

In other words, with the police behaving no differently from the thugs who murdered Mutedza, the chances of a cool-headed, professional and impartial investigation into the Glenview crime, let alone the securing of a conviction of those guilty of the murder, are next to nothing.

Surely the Afro-pessimist would be justified in saying that only in Africa could a farce, such as we are witnessing in the handling of the Mutedza murder case, happen.

For the record, it matters little who killed Mutedza, or even for what reasons. The point is human blood was needlessly spilt and we just cannot sit back and watch while the vultures among us try to turn Mutedzas death into some kind of political football.

A life was lost and that should be motive enough for all of us – whether MDC or Zanu (PF) – to rise and demand justice for Mutedza.

It is simply unacceptable that we should behave as if slaughtering someone at a public marketplace on a Sunday afternoon is normal. Because it is not.