The afternoon before a holiday weekend
It’s Friday and the day before a long weekend off. But rather than being excited about a well-deserved break, the atmosphere in our office has been tense. We were all rushing to get work done as quickly as possible so we could leave. A visit from the ‘price police’ (CIO) on a Friday could be calamitous. If they decide to arrest you today, it means a long weekend, four days, in a filthy jail cell.
It doesn’t matter whether you are guilty or not, it just depends on who pays the visit and whether you are able to answer the questions quickly enough. That’s not as easy to do as you might think, especially since the general feeling is that visits are deliberately paid on a Friday so that they CAN lock you up for a long time - all the better for intimidation. It doesn’t matter if you are the owner or the manager, what matters is that it was YOU who was there when they arrived. So, you can understand, we all wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.
My colleague and I did get away eventually and driving through town we saw two long queues, both outside butcheries. We guess that one of two things was going on: either a delivery had arrived and people were queuing for a rare chance to buy meat; or the price police are in there forcing the butchers to knock down their prices. In which case the queue is to be the first to grab what they can at absurdly low prices.
As we drove past one queue we saw a fight - or what we thought was a fight - break out at the head of the queue: people running and shouting, women suddenly yelling warnings. We turned for a better look, only to see that it was riot police, three of them, wielding batons at some of the people in the front of the queue. We don’t know why because the queue looked amazingly peaceful and restrained given the stressful conditions in the country these days. But such is life in Zimbabwe.
Happy heroes day everyone.
Where are our heros?
Someone of them - the ‘heroes’ - are living off the fat of the land, feasting on intimidation and cultivated hatred while they strip our country of its assets and turn us into employees running from an office in case we end up spending nights in jail for nothing.
Our other heroes are queuing for petrol, meat, fuel, and they are randomly and stupidly bashed by the riot police simply because they are trying to survive.
Hang in there our Zimbabwe friends; we will have our day one day.
