People congregated in small crowds singing hymns and saying prayers...their heads drooping down, can’t figure out whether they are cursing fate or disparaging the birth of their babies because their lives are limited to the time they enter into realm of this world...the crowd is moving and taking tiny steps for...giving its last presence around ‘tiny, freshly dug graves’...the funeral - an epitome of the only growing industry in Zimbabwe!
Prevailing circumstances are towing people with its current of hopelessness and irony of the situation is that they are themselves feeling responsible for bringing clouds of bereavement o’er their newborns. The mothers feel guilty for not providing them with food, it’s just that I can’t find the food that will make my baby grow, said a mom of an 18-month-old baby who weighed just 11lb (5kg).
Children in the region are grappling with an extreme form of kwashiorkor - vitamin deficiency and this has seen an upward trend after that notorious Operation Murambatsvina (clean out the filth) campaign, which instead of resisting allowed the fiendish claws of malnutrition and starvation to nurture of its own; although, it’s a different story that President Robert Mugabe’s government have completely rebutted the allegations.
If we talk about capital itself, we find that government sponsored people have taken in the position of the MDC city council, and have further ’sanctioned’ the crumbling down of the remaining infrastructure. Raw sewage flows out on to the ground, close to where people have dug makeshift boreholes to find water.
Situation seems to take its toll especially when natives receive information regarding the ‘arrival of food’, as obvious, they are asked to form queues, which start at dawn, curling around several blocks of the city and when the starved people traverse ‘decorum of the queue’, well, they receive batons by the soldiers and police.
We are a patient, reasonable people but unless they bring us bread, sugar, mealie meal soon, there will be food riots in the cities of Zimbabwe, said one man in the queue with three children to feed at home.
But whatever the contemporary scenario is, Mr. President is not oblivious of it and believe me he is trying his level best to pull his country from the fetters of depravity with his musical debut, Beitbridge, after all, he is trying to infuse the spirit of patriotism among his people. Hmm...so after brainwashing, this comes as a second gesture of ‘helping hand’ from the President himself, ain’t it?
