A Picture is worth a 1000 words

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, let's test that theory. Write down your first thoughts in the comments section.

The Emperors have no clothes!!!

One of the defining moments in my relatively short life was picking up a book called ‘The First Man in Rome’ by Colleen McCullough at the Bulawayo Public Library, that hallowed place where I went every weekend to soak up the masters of literature. In those books I came across the political greats such as Gaius Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Marius. Men whose actions both good and bad shaped the rise of what is possibly the greatest Empire mankind has ever known, Rome.

Which perhaps would go far in explaining my utter disgust, my complete revulsion, my horror, the stupefaction that befell me as I read this headline: “Zimbabwe's latest way to stop HIV: Force women to have fewer baths and shave off their hair to make them less attractive”. My mind rushed for some explanation to such a startlingly stupid headline, perhaps it’s some comedian or stupid TV presenter running their mouth off. But alas. Dear reader, these words were uttered by none other than a member of the Senate of the Republic of Zimbabwe. The Senate!!! The halls of highest legislative body in the land, the halls that bear the same name that the Roman Empire gave to their own decision making body, the halls that are to be the fount of the will of the people, the laws of the land, the dignity and gravitas of the State; The halls populated by such idiots.

I am over reacting I hear you say? How can I honestly take one measly line, probably taken out of context and run my mouth off? The problem this is not the first time. A few years ago, another Senator announced in all innocence that scientists should drop whatever it is that they were wasting time with and invent a drug that stops men having sex with prostitutes, and in case we were people who believed in second chances she followed that comment up with a speech imploring Parliament to distribute sex toys in prisons to stop prisoners abusing each other. Or how about last week’s comment from the Vice President of the country that her husband regularly slept away from their marriage home but that like a good wife who knows she cannot tame the bull, she had stayed. The venue for these remarks was none other than the memorial service of said late husband.

This is just a choice selection of quotes from some of the most powerful people in that country of mine. I would add more but unfortunately there are laws in place that would make it a crime (which in and of itself is saying something). These are the people who lead us, these are the people we expect to wake up every morning and chart the course the future of our national pride, our heritage, our collective nationhood along the stormy seas of global politics. These are the people who, God forbid, we expect to guide us should World War III suddenly break out and threaten the very existence of the human species. These are the people we put our faith and trust in, who we invest with the highest privileges our country can bestow and expect to damn well work their hardest to show for it. And this is what they say.

“MDC-T Member of Parliament, Thabitha Khumalo, said that women should not fight their husbands’ girlfriends, saying this could reduce the spread of infections.” 

Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo: “(South Africans) are dirty. In fact they are filthy and recklessly uncouth”. 

Dr Joseph Made, the Minister of Agriculture who famously predicted a bumper harvest months before one of Zimbabweans biggest droughts presenting a report to parliament outlining the reasons for his oversight: “Our investigations have shown that a monkey caused damage to a transformer, thereby sabotaging our preparations for the coming season”.

Patrick Chinamasa, Minister of Justice, on dismissing charges brought against the Zimbabwean government: “"The ICC is there for serious crimes against humanity - not ordinary crime, which is what these exiles [and the South African High Court is] trying to suggest."

Google is my friend. Do not think I had to go far to get these quotes, nor that they represent the worst. Like I said before, some quotes would get me arrested so I leave the googling to you. And perhaps let us judge them by their actions and not their words? Where do you want to begin? The bankruptcy and cessation of operations that Air Zimbabwe announced early this year? Or perhaps the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authorities admission that power cuts of up to 9 hours per day in urban centres would continue for at least the next five years. Should we consider the famous incident where Anna Tibaijuka, a United Nations special envoy was fêted like royalty in Harare and declared to be a champion of the African Renaissance…until the day she issued a damning report that stated the governments’ ‘Operation Murambatsvina’ violated both local and international law and deprived a large number of Zimbabweans of their basic human rights.

“Operation Restore Order, while purporting to target illegal dwellings and structures and to clamp down on alleged illicit activities, was carried out in an indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering, and, in repeated cases, with disregard to several provisions of national and international legal frameworks” – United Nations Executive Summary, 2005

There is a flag fluttering above the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe, another one stands proud above the Houses of Parliament and Senate and thousands more are scattered around the country and our embassies all over the world. These flags represent me, they represent the dreams and aspirations my ancestors had for me as they gazed at the African heavens centuries ago, they represent the blood of untold thousands who gave their lives fighting the fight of freedom, they represent the hope and the vision of a country born out of the ashes of a repressive regime that was Ian Smith’s government and the Mfecane that Shaka Zulu waged against my kingdom. Perhaps that flag will never fly as proudly as the purple robes of the Senators of the Roman Empire but our dreams are just as important to me, as precious and as deserving the utmost effort to make them a reality.

So I shall not hesitate in shouting that the so-called Emperors who run off their mouths calling for women to stop bathing or who strip any segment of the Zimbabwean population of their rights to liberty, to truth and to justice, that these men and women have no clothes and that they shame the hallowed halls of power of my land. They rule in the name of millions of Zimbabweans, what power we have given them, we can take away. Do not forget that Senator Morgan Femai.

Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

An Open Letter To Nicolas Sarkozy

You know those things that you always come across on your Facebook, funny pics and photos that have you rushing to click 'share'. Well I stumbled across a gem of a letter the other day that I shared on my profile but the problem is it was entirely in French, a language the good majority of my Facebook contacts don't understand. So here, in part for all my Anglophone contacts, and mostly for Chris Nqoe, a very outspoken friend of mine who will understand why I so admire this letter, I reproduce it in full, and in English. Enjoy. 

The French People
Here and Elsewhere Road
99999 France

Monsieur SARKOZY Nicolas

Elysée Palace

55, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré

75008 Paris

BAR-LE-DUC, the 7th of May 2012

RE: Spontaneous Candidature to the (Violated) Post of President of the French Republic

Mr SARKOZY, 

We would like to take the opportunity to thank you for the interest you have shown in the position (and most of all its numerous perks).

We have received your application for the continuation of your term but we regret to inform you that your profile does not at all correspond with the one that is necessary to fulfil all the requirements of this post. That is why we have come to the regrettable decision to withdraw our employment contract of which you have been a beneficiary since May 2007 (the current EU crisis has also obliged us to lay off a large number of personnel...).

We sincerely hope that you will continue to consult our future employment offers in the hope of finding a new job, we draw your attention to the numerous courses for the jobless, which we are hoping to implement in the near future, and which would allow you to become a flutist, a coppersmith or perhaps a magician (being economic sectors unaffected by the current downturn and in which you have shown considerable natural talent).

We would be very grateful if you would please leave the keys to the Elysée Palace (and those of the Airbus A330) in the vase by the front door. We however, in our infinite mercy, leave you free to dispose in any way you see fit that hideous Italian vase that is cluttering the lounge...

Nevertheless please allow us to wish you success in the pursuit of your career (you see, we also know how to lie).

Allow us, Monsieur Sarkozy, to express our highest regards to your pathetic self,

Best Regards,

The French People

If Mark Zuckerburg was Zimbabwean

Mark Zuckerberg! This is an open letter to you, and if by some miracle someone knows someone who knows someone who knows you (six degrees of separation remember!) then I pray they pass it along the social networking chain till it lands on your Facebook Homepage.

Ever since I watched the movie, The Social Network, I’ve envied you. Green is a colour I hate but I have to confess my heart turns a sickening shade of green when you are mentioned anywhere in my hearing. I mean you and I share so much and yet we are worlds apart. We both apparently have a fascination with technology and people, we both studied Computer Science, though I can smugly say I actually finished my course whereas you didn’t. But of course to be fair, I have to mention that you are orders of magnitude richer than I am at the present moment. But in order that I may sleep at night and just to console myself, I wonder from time to time what would have happened if you and I had swapped places. Specifically where you would be had you been born in Zimbabwe all those years ago.

You see Mark, your choice of birthplace has quite a lot to do with your success. I found myself being awarded a Birth Certificate crowned with the National Crest of Zimbabwe, whilst you on the other side of the planet were born to the star spangled banner and from there on your life was on a roll. Now imagine for a moment, Mark, what would have happened had you been born here? Well first of all let me tell you, the likelihood of you having a first name that was actually a verb or an adjective would be infinitely higher. Probably you might have been called Prosper Zuckerberg, Brilliant Zuckerberg, or maybe even Delight Zuckerberg. You see, people in my country have this amazing and as yet unexplained predilection for getting inspiration for their children’s names within the pages of dictionaries. But that I suppose is me making mountains out of molehills. Your face would still look good on the cover of Time Magazine whether your name was Mark or Lovemore.

Priority Zuckerberg just doesn't have the same ring to it does it?

But that begs the question would you have made it to the cover of Time in the first place? Let us see. If you were Zimbabwean you probably would have followed basically the same path your life took in the first two decades of your life: a rather pleasant life (in the beginning), a strong academic background & your parents encouraging you to take up Sciences or Engineering courses at the University of Zimbabwe. But there I think you would hit your first barrier. Let me put it this way; try telling a Zimbabwean parent that you are dropping out of University to start a website and they will either (a) Smack you with a sjambok till you can’t walk and you forget any notion of dropping out (b) Call a meeting of your extended family and take you out to your rural village to consult with the ancestors as to why you were straying (c) Take you to a prayer meeting at Word of Life International to chase the demons out of you. You see it’s not easy being a Zimbabwean. Now let’s for a moment assume that you were made of stern stuff Mark and you got through all those obstacles and still quit school, after all the movie made it seem even the faculty of Harvard couldn’t take you down.

Ok, so now you have started what would become Facebook in the garage of your best friends’ parents. You are now spending hours coding away and busily creating the codebase that will hopefully become what Facebook is today. There you are, you’ve just created the function that dynamically refreshes status updates in real-time on both the sever and connected clients. You sit flush with success then wham!! The electricity goes. You see in Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority has a very liberal definition of what the verb ‘supply’ actually means. We have suffered rolling blackuts in all major centres for the best part of a decade. And there goes the 800 lines of code that you spent six weeks creating. I can hear your Zimbabwean alter ego screaming in frustration from this universe. Sigh.

The people at ZESA don't quite understand what the verb 'supply' means....

But again, let’s assume you are made of metal Mark. You go on to create a function that saves all your work as you create it so that power cuts don’t really bother you. And when push comes to shove, you use the car battery of your mom’s Datsun to power your laptop. Facebook is growing, but much more slowly than it did at Harvard because let’s face it, Zimbabweans are not exactly the most connected people in the world. When the only computer with internet connection is a paid for one at the local internet café, it is far much easier not to get addicted to social networking sites. But you are a genius Mark and you figure out that launching Facebook on mobile is going to get you further than it would on the PC. Off you go to code a further 10 million lines of code for the different mobile platforms and you present your product to the country. Users are excited and Facebook seems to be taking off…but there is a slight problem. You see Mark, in Zimbabwe, cellphone data coverage is still more of an art that it is an exact science. Even standing next to a base station, with your phone fully charged and showing full signal bars, Opera Mini will still tell you that there is no data connection, please try later. Yes that scream you hear is the sound of Zimbabwean Mark, clinging to his sanity by a thread.

But Mark, I have faith in you. You are a genius. After all, why else would they name you Person of the Year? You figure a way round it by somehow hacking into Econet’s, Telecel’s and Net-One’s servers and fixing what seems to have stumped all the engineers who currently work there. Facebook takes off and is a roaring success, spreading from University to University like wildfire. The South Africans come and invest US$ 20 million dollars and before you know it, you are installing servers in basements all over Harare and Bulawayo. Then one day a ZESA power surge destroys them all! Okay let’s be kind and assume that would never happen. Facebook is growing in leaps and bounds; you appear on the cover of the Harare Herald as the man about to change the face of computing forever. You sit in your mansion in Borrowdale Brooke, calmly contemplating your bright future, when you hear an ominous knocking at your solid mahogany door imported from Lebanon (you see if you were Zimbabwean you would feel the need to include such details in your daily conversation).

The door opens to reveal a trio of men in black Saville Row suits and Oakley sunglasses. When they leave three hours later, you are left staring at the document that as they, painstakingly, explained gives them the legal right to sift through all the user date in every single one of your servers for information that could compromise the security of the Zimbabwean Republic. Yes Mark, if you thought the United States Senate was being difficult on you for not protecting your user’s data, you have not met the Zimbabwean government who assume they own all your user’s data. Sigh. But again, you show yourself to be a man of integrity and morals and you begin what becomes a titanic battle between your company and the Zimbabwean government at the African Union’s Human Rights Commission. Let’s assume the African Union is full of amazing individuals who protect the rights of all Africans and you win your case. Bazinga! But seriously just for the sake of it, let’s just assume you win and Facebook shrugs off the lawsuit and you set your sights on the stars.

Oh Mark. I wish I could tell you it ends well. Your Zimbabwean alter-ego has so far shown resilience in the face of power cuts, ingenuity in the face of poor services, moral uprightness in the face of the Secret Police. Surely this story ends happily? Well, there is the slight problem of that pesky last name of yours. Zuckerberg. It’s not Zimbabwean enough. I know, I know, you were born in Zimbabwe but so were a few thousand white farmers who got chased off their farms. The day will come when your company is served with papers from the Ministry of Indigenization, notifying you that the Zimbabwean government is taking over 51% of your shares for the nominal price of US$2.50. This spooks all your investors who immediately abandon ship and next thing Google and Yahoo! make a joint buyout which the Zimbabean government, as the controlling party in your company, approves. Facebook is ‘restructured’ as a feature of Yahoo! Mail and after a few months, is quietly shelved into oblivion by Yahoo!

The new indigenized Facebook logo
(c) Ministry of Ingenization (Yes we have a Ministry called that!)

Which leaves you where dear Mark/Priority/GodKnows Zuckerberg? There there. Maybe you will have the sense to move to South Africa and start Twitter? You see Mark, I am on your side, this entire article notwithstanding. So whenever you have a bad day Mark, read this article slowly and carefully, and thank all your ancestors who somehow conspired to make sure you were born as far away from Zimbabwe as you actually were.

Bazinga!