BBC’s unfinished business
Atcheya, the ghetto’s revered tailor, has a nephew in college. Now, the scholar is spending much of his time at beer halls, Sunday to Sunday. The boy is among students smoked out of colleges following demonstrations against a fee hike.
Our circle then made it a point to sit Atcheya down and equip him with darts with which to shoot his nephew back to productivity. And, talk of the devil, he will come in running!
From the shadows of the market stalls emerged the tailor’s nephew, almost crawling from under the yoke of intoxicants.
The brew in his head had him singing. He was singing songs of hate. The subject of that hate was none other than law enforcers. He sang, jeered and spat out unprintable phraseology.
The circle was left to rue where manners had slipped to. We are living in a fast-changing world—a dog eat dog one.
We discussed the good old days when society and law enforcers were friends. There used to be a song that echoed the sweet relations between the two sides, painting the holy nature of law enforcement when it came to bailing citizens out of trouble.
I was a pretty little young innocent mind when this song shot to fame:
Abale anga ndinu nomwe, ndikadzafa ine mudzanditola
Abale anga ndinu nomwe, ndikadzafa ine mudzanditola
But recently, the council of our ghetto held a view that law enforcement is again and again being thrown to the dogs.
Is it not the reason people trusted to guard and protect the law now go and break the same law, with utter impunity?
You tend to wonder. If a ‘law enforcer’ can brandish their lack of courtesy and corner girls in the heat of a student’s demonstration and beat the defenceless chaps, what good is it in this world for the civilian?
What sort of world are we living in if ‘law enforcers’ even have the audacity to catch their misbehaviour on camera, kumajambulana pa foni ena akumenya atsikana?
We need to assign these people a new anthem. We can draw a few lines from Mlaka Maliro’s Tchalo.
Atchalo kumenya, ngati akukuntha pilo!
Today, if at all there has been anything done about such bad cops, then it all has been veiled from the very public whose decency the cops defiled by laying unkind hands on the girls.
Look here, good people. Life is so unjust and justice is relative and selective. One Lower Shire soul called Eric Aniva is behind bars for allegedly indulging in a harmful sexual cultural practice with young girls.
Aniva’s walls fell in after BBC did an ‘expose’ on his runs and errands. Now the prayer could be that BBC flies in a reporter to document the story of the law enforcers who physically abused university girls during a demonstration!
The ghetto is ready to ‘fund’ such an errand!
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