Last week we read of a Nigerian man, Joe Iroko, who was arrested after he named his dog Buhari.
Apparently the authorities were not too pleased that the dog shared the same name as President Muhahhadu Buhari. But Cde Iroko was not quite done. After a few days in jail as he struggled to post bail, he told the media that he had another dog called Obama and one of his late canine pets had been called Nelson Mandela.
Cde Iroko indicated to the Vanguard newspaper that his intention was not to insult. Rather, it was his way of paying homage to the people he respected. Which is why he also named one of the dogs Joe — his own name. Evidently, Zimbabwean canine favourites like “Bhoki”, “Spider” and “Rover” will not do for good old Cde Iroko.
So, hilarious as the story was, it certainly did not smack of malice. There was no give-a-dog-a-bad-name-then-hang-him stuff going on there.
This quite unlike a 2012 case in China. The Austrian Times reported that a woman named Hu Lin fell out with her neighbour, Wang Sun. Six years later, she named her dog Wang.
‘To get her own back she named her dog Wang and then whenever she saw me she would start swearing and insulting the dog using my name,’ Wang (the neighbour, not the dog) reportedly said during court proceedings.
It boggles the mind how the judiciary can allow perpetrators of fresh violence the “right” to go back onto the streets even as those whose cars were burnt and whose shops were looted are still counting their losses.
The judge punished the woman with a £500 fine and also ordered her to apologise. Just the other week, right here in Harare, a man called Scomed Masasa was at the Civil Court seeking a peace order against his neighbour Raphael Nyanga.
The bone of contention (no pun intended): “Nyanga named one his puppies Scomed … I am the only one named Scomed in Zimbabwe and I am certain he did that to spite me.”
Nyanga responded thus: “Yes, I have a puppy called Scomed and I named it after he made threats to my family.”
Needless to say, Cde Scomed got his peace order — but we don’t know if the puppy has been renamed.
Talk about giving a dog a bad name and then hanging him. It is one of the easiest and most disingenuous ways of putting an opponent down. Zimbabwe is great testament to that.
Call President Mugabe “autocratic” and you have an excuse to hound him out of office, never mind that an overwhelming majority voted for him to occupy office until at least 2018.
Get a few score mercenaries to get onto the streets and provoke the police into crowd control reaction, call it “police brutality”, and you have an excuse to cry for “Sadc intervention”, whatever that is.
The template has been used with brutal devastation in a host of countries over the decades, from Cde Allende’s Chile, Cde Castro’s Cuba to Cde Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
Propelling the agenda, always, is an arsenal of words from the lexicon of empire — adjectives of mass destruction, if you will. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman call this the “manufacturing of consent”.
Mahmood Mamdani wrote of this in a 2007 paper titled “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency”.
“Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context.
“Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator.
“Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil.”
Still, we don’t learn.
In fact, some institutions that should promote and protect societal order sometimes lend a platform for the bad naming of dogs, perhaps unaware of the impending hanging.
For instance, it boggles the mind how the judiciary can allow perpetrators of fresh violence the “right” to go back onto the streets even as those whose cars were burnt and whose shops were looted are still counting their losses. Yes, the Constitution guarantees rights of expression, association and to protest. The same Constitution values peace and development above all else.
It also places limits on rights, especially where they infringe on the inalienable rights of the majority of the rest of the citizenry.
It is a concept that Justice Bharat Patel captured well in a 2010 ruling turning down an attempt by a group of white farmers to register a Sadc Tribunal ruling in Zimbabwe that would have effectively reversed the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme.
Justice Patel said while public policy dictated that the tribunal’s decisions be recognised and enforced in Zimbabwe, application of this general rule depended on the facts of individual cases and the legal and practical consequences of recognising and enforcing such decisions. He said the former farmers were absolutely correct in expecting Government to implement the tribunal’s decisions, but there were an incomparably greater number of Zimbabweans who shared the legitimate expectations that Government would effectively implement land reforms and fulfil their aspirations.
“Given these countervailing expectations, public policy as informed by basic utilitarian precept would dictate that the greater public good must prevail,” he said.
This is a principle that all four estates of the realm must hold dear: in all considerations and actions, the greater public good must prevail.
EDITORIAL COMMENT: The duty of the four estates
The Sunday Mail
The world is going to the dogs.
Last week we read of a Nigerian man, Joe Iroko, who was arrested after he named his dog Buhari.
Apparently the authorities were not too pleased that the dog shared the same name as President Muhahhadu Buhari. But Cde Iroko was not quite done. After a few days in jail as he struggled to post bail, he told the media that he had another dog called Obama and one of his late canine pets had been called Nelson Mandela.
Cde Iroko indicated to the Vanguard newspaper that his intention was not to insult. Rather, it was his way of paying homage to the people he respected. Which is why he also named one of the dogs Joe — his own name. Evidently, Zimbabwean canine favourites like “Bhoki”, “Spider” and “Rover” will not do for good old Cde Iroko.
So, hilarious as the story was, it certainly did not smack of malice. There was no give-a-dog-a-bad-name-then-hang-him stuff going on there.
This quite unlike a 2012 case in China. The Austrian Times reported that a woman named Hu Lin fell out with her neighbour, Wang Sun. Six years later, she named her dog Wang.
‘To get her own back she named her dog Wang and then whenever she saw me she would start swearing and insulting the dog using my name,’ Wang (the neighbour, not the dog) reportedly said during court proceedings.
It boggles the mind how the judiciary can allow perpetrators of fresh violence the “right” to go back onto the streets even as those whose cars were burnt and whose shops were looted are still counting their losses.The judge punished the woman with a £500 fine and also ordered her to apologise. Just the other week, right here in Harare, a man called Scomed Masasa was at the Civil Court seeking a peace order against his neighbour Raphael Nyanga.
The bone of contention (no pun intended): “Nyanga named one his puppies Scomed … I am the only one named Scomed in Zimbabwe and I am certain he did that to spite me.”
Nyanga responded thus: “Yes, I have a puppy called Scomed and I named it after he made threats to my family.”
Needless to say, Cde Scomed got his peace order — but we don’t know if the puppy has been renamed.
Talk about giving a dog a bad name and then hanging him. It is one of the easiest and most disingenuous ways of putting an opponent down. Zimbabwe is great testament to that.
Call President Mugabe “autocratic” and you have an excuse to hound him out of office, never mind that an overwhelming majority voted for him to occupy office until at least 2018.
Get a few score mercenaries to get onto the streets and provoke the police into crowd control reaction, call it “police brutality”, and you have an excuse to cry for “Sadc intervention”, whatever that is.
The template has been used with brutal devastation in a host of countries over the decades, from Cde Allende’s Chile, Cde Castro’s Cuba to Cde Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
Propelling the agenda, always, is an arsenal of words from the lexicon of empire — adjectives of mass destruction, if you will. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman call this the “manufacturing of consent”.
Mahmood Mamdani wrote of this in a 2007 paper titled “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency”.
“Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context.
“Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator.
“Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil.”
Still, we don’t learn.
In fact, some institutions that should promote and protect societal order sometimes lend a platform for the bad naming of dogs, perhaps unaware of the impending hanging.
For instance, it boggles the mind how the judiciary can allow perpetrators of fresh violence the “right” to go back onto the streets even as those whose cars were burnt and whose shops were looted are still counting their losses. Yes, the Constitution guarantees rights of expression, association and to protest. The same Constitution values peace and development above all else.
It also places limits on rights, especially where they infringe on the inalienable rights of the majority of the rest of the citizenry.
It is a concept that Justice Bharat Patel captured well in a 2010 ruling turning down an attempt by a group of white farmers to register a Sadc Tribunal ruling in Zimbabwe that would have effectively reversed the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme.
Justice Patel said while public policy dictated that the tribunal’s decisions be recognised and enforced in Zimbabwe, application of this general rule depended on the facts of individual cases and the legal and practical consequences of recognising and enforcing such decisions. He said the former farmers were absolutely correct in expecting Government to implement the tribunal’s decisions, but there were an incomparably greater number of Zimbabweans who shared the legitimate expectations that Government would effectively implement land reforms and fulfil their aspirations.
“Given these countervailing expectations, public policy as informed by basic utilitarian precept would dictate that the greater public good must prevail,” he said.
This is a principle that all four estates of the realm must hold dear: in all considerations and actions, the greater public good must prevail.
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