The Sunday Mail
It is quite shocking that Alick Macheso is being seen as the victim in his marriage to Tafadzwa fiasco, with Tafadzwa being the villain. Opinions differ and will continue to differ, but it seems there is a tendency of confusing sympathy with justice, which could be the reason why scores of people turned up at the Harare Civil Courts to sympathise with Macheso, calling Tafadzwa all sorts of unprintable names along the course.
As much I hold no brief for Tafadzwa, because the whole nation knows that David Ngwerume of Hamunakwadi, Nyandoro and Nyambuya Law Chambers holds that portfolio, I think Macheso prepared his own bed and it is now time to sleep in it. He should not be blaming anyone but himself for the mess that he finds himself in. That is if he is in any mess.
For starters, what was he doing leaving Nyadzisai, the mother of his five, or is it six, children, for Tafadzwa? Why does he now want to play victim? Victim to whom? Victim to what? If he has been a victim, he can only be a victim to his judgement skills, or lack thereof. The world was united in advising him against Tafadzwa in 2010 and he turned a deaf ear – now that the tables have turned he wants us to believe that he was conned into the union.
Really? You can fool some people sometimes but you cannot fool everyone all the time. I have no sympathy for Macheso.
My prayers are that they go for the paternity tests, and they come out positive that he is the father of those two children, and Tafadzwa goes back to the courts and applies for an upward variation of the maintenance that was granted last Thursday. That would serve him right.
She can further argue that in the previous maintenance hearing, Macheso approached the courts with dirty hands, was being economic with the truth and that his argument that he wants a paternity test first might have persuaded the courts to give her a smaller amount. Now that the tests have proved the children are his, then he has to let his family live more comfortably. “So I pray that this honorable court up my claim to $2 500.”
That would really serve him right.
Looks like I am getting emotional, which I am not supposed to. I don’t want to be drawn into discussing the capabilities of the legal team representing Macheso, but I think it was folly of him to attach a token of divorce when he filed his papers to counter the maintenance claim. Macheso is customarily married to Tafadzwa and if there is any divorce proceedings to be initiated, then they have to be done customarily.
That should be as clear as day and night.
If Macheso requested that Tafadzwa’s relatives gather so that he could marry her, then he should ask for the same gathering, or a representative gathering of the same, so that he can divorce her. This in my opinion is not going to be a stroll in the park. This is a gathering of grey-haired old men and women, from both camps, who will question the reasons behind the divorce.
And as Tafadzwa has already stated, she has not asked for divorce so the onus will be on Macheso to divorce her, showing and proving cause along the way. If I were him I would wait for the paternity tests before initiating that process, hoping that the tests will prove the children are not his. Only when the tests prove the children are not his can he go to his in-laws and accuse Tafadzwa of dishonesty. But that is just me thinking.
If the children are proved to be his, then he has a mountain to climb. Apart from insisting that he wants paternity tests, he has not given any hint of the reason why he wants the tests. Did he catch his wife being intimate with another man? If he did, even the Bible allows divorce on infidelity.
The story that Tafadzwa did not carry those two pregnancies, on a common sense basis, does not hold water. If, indeed, Tafadzwa fooled him twice over the pregnancies, then Macheso is the biggest fool in the world. How can you stay with a wife who fakes two pregnancies, and not notice it?
So whilst we await the results of the paternity tests, Macheso should continue looking after his family as he has been doing in the past four years, for nothing has really changed. And if those two children turn out to be his, then it would be more misery, more embarrassment for the sungura musician.
But then again, who cares? Macheso was warned when Tafadzwa came on the scene that he was biting more than he could chew. And he proceeded to bite – now he has to swallow. This reminds me of the advice usually given to one swallowing a mango seed that they should prepare themselves for the next five or six hours, for that seed will not stay in their stomach for eternity, eventually it will have to come out.
Now that all the emotions have been exhausted, what lessons have we learnt from Macheso’s tomfoolery? The lessons are many and varied, especially for the men folk. The most important being that one should stay faithful, that the first wife (mai vemumba), should be respected and loved. Now who is having the last laugh? Nyadzisai, of course.
The other lesson is that no matter how popular one is the law still has to take its course. You cannot substitute justice with sympathy. Those who thronged the courts sympathizing with Macheso might have forgotten that he has an obligation to look after his family.
Forget the nhova issue, the dora thing, for when couples are divorcing or having a tough time, such utterances are common. It is just a pity that the Macheso-Tafadzwa issue has played out in the public domain, but those who have had the chance to go through similar experiences will readily testify that worse things can be said and done when couples are about to divorce.
But bottom line is that the relationship is between Macheso and Tafadzwa, they are the two who know where they met, how and why they met. So it must not surprise us, days down the line, if we were to read that Macheso and Tafadzwa are back together, they are the only ones who know what binds them or what bound them together. It is not for us to judge, nor for us to interfere.
In an interview with Tafadzwa the other week, she complained that Macheso does not live his own life, that he does not make his own decisions. She gave an intimate look into their marriage, where the band makes decision that has to do with family issues – in short that he cannot draw the line between work and home. Whether she was seeking sympathy remains unclear, that is something else.
As we wait for the next chapter in the sizzling Alick Macheso’s marriage soap opera – and possibly pending divorce – to Tafadzwa Mapako, let us not be tempted to label Macheso the victim and Tafadzwa the gold-digger, for no one has the intimate details of what really went on in that marriage, or what went wrong.
Chakafukudza dzimba matenga, as Shona elders would always say.
