The Sunday Mail
There is always a rustic romanticism between hard work and the village, which is quite explainable. Whatever rural folk eat is the direct result of their daily, weekly and seasonal toils.
Nowhere is there a direct link between work and welfare as in the village: you snooze, you lose; you work, you eat.
Simple!
So, the harder village folk work, the more wealth accrues to them.
And they have mastered this age-old sweet existential science.
The abominable creature called inflation is only but a tame creature for rural folk, for their earthly possessions are what economic wonks would call inflation-linked assets.
Chickens, goats and cows are insulated from inflation.
Bishop Lazi pleasantly or unpleasantly discovered this truism one fine afternoon when he, plagued by a nostalgic craving for a road-runner — those free-range chickens which, ostrich-like, have the uncanny ability to supersonically zoom in and out of sight at the blink of an eye — at one of those busy informal shopping centres in the capital.
These staked chicken spazas often offer a potpourri of chicken varieties: the zombie-like broiler chicken, off-layers and, of course, the road-runners.
For the Bishop, the choice was simple — the road-runner — and in any case, he surmised the price would not significantly chew into his monthly stipend.
It is just logical: how else can a chicken that feeds on inexpensive maggots and grasshoppers be more expensive than the one that is constantly plied with costly feed?
How wrong I was.
Fifty-freaking bucks ($50) was the mind-numbing price that Bishop Lazarus was quoted.
And get this: the broiler chicken was only half the price.
A coy man of the cloth, ashamedly unable to plead poverty, subsequently made way to his rundown jalopy under the pretence that he was going to collect the cash only to disappear in the melee of the African townships.
So village folk still live life in the most puritan and sacred way God ordained, which means productively living off the land.
Sweat of your face
It is not surprising that they easily identify with Genesis 3:19, which declares that: “By the sweat of your face shall you eat your bread, until you return to the ground — because out of it were you taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”
This is also why the land and livestock become an invaluable and sacred socio-political asset for the rural economy.
So in the vast real estate of rural Zimbabwe, the land is worshipped, while the dignity of hard work is cherished.
And then there is the cesspool that we call the city, where, conversely, obscene hustling and deal-making guarantees filthy lucre, while honest, hard work absurdly assures poverty.
Quite frankly, this Bishop, who is always haunted by his strong rural background (SRB), struggles to get used to the ways of the city.
It’s really a weird world, where most people, if not all, expect something for nothing, and give nothing for something.
They think that the best way to make money is to buy and sell money.
They also think that groceries such as food grow in supermarkets, while electricity, just like sunlight, can just appear in their homes.
Mr Government, they say, is unfailingly supposed to ensure that somehow all this is always available.
This is why they stridently moan about power cuts while sitting on piles of unpaid bills.
This is also the reason why urban folk inconsolably cry about bread shortages, while their land lies fallow.
Everyone expects to reap, but no one is prepared to sow.
No wonder we are all stuck in this rut.
We now unashamedly import everything: food, toothpicks, toilet paper, bed linen, clothes, undergarments, even the newsprint that this pious piece is written on.
Buy, buy, buy, buy and buy is all what urban folk do.
So unlike in the rural areas where land is worshipped and hard work cherished, urban folk worship money and cherish the primitive accumulation of wealth.
They can do anything — except work — for money.
Well, the pursuit for money in the city is seemingly demonic; it almost makes it soulless.
The parable of the rich fool in Luke 12, who was preoccupied with building big barns for his bountiful harvest so that he could “Eat, drink, and be merry”, not knowing that his life could end in an instant, tells of the folly of obsessing over earthly possessions.
Matthew 6:19-24 warns: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. . .
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
Having had a fair share of travelling and living abroad, Bishop Lazi will tell you that everywhere and anywhere, people live under the God-ordained rule of hard work.
Major civilisations are built on sheer sweat and graft.
In these societies, ordinary workers often take up many jobs and shifts to make ends meet.
It is all work, work, work and more work.
Naked bathers
But as I have been preaching of late, the tide is slowing turning from the abnormal to the normal.
A normal economy is like a rural economy, where wealth is inextricably linked to hard work.
It typically punishes wheeling and dealing and exalts sweat and graft.
But since October last year, the tide has been progressively turning with the gradual removal of market distortions.
Soon and very soon, Zimbos will be paying a fair price for their fuel and electricity, which will asphyxiate a lot of arbitrage that was making some people filthy rich.
And with Government turning off the taps, which were funding some of the ostentatious urban lifestyles, it is going to be hard for those folks who block traffic along Angwa Street – opposite Ximex Mall – doing God knows what.
Adjusting to normal lifestyles will be a painful detoxifying period for many.
As Warren Buffet often says: “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who has been swimming naked”. Kikiki.
Many naked bathers will surely be exposed.
Already we are beginning to see the exposed bums of panicky MDC members as the steadying effect of the recently introduced Zimbabwe dollar begins to take root.
You see, the MDC lot has one ace up their sleeve: they think a faltering economy will clear their pathway to State House.
So a stable economy is therefore an anathema to their cause.
The recent nascent signs of economic stability as the market is trying to find its level have now thrown the camp off balance.
And the noise levels betray the panic that is now setting in.
With a rhyming president, whose brain is now under the curatorship of the US embassy; a motormouth deputy called Biti, who suffers from delusions of imaginary grandeur, and the misogynist hulk with the might of an ox and the brains of a bull who will be a Bikita tourist for quite some time, it can only get worse for the troubled “movement”.
And that reload crap that was launched last week.
Why thoroughly unproductive men should agitate for the use of the US-dollar, while yesterday there were telling us that adopting the South African rand would be ideal, boggles the mind.
Good luck with that American agenda, comrades.
Chamisa should read the sad script of the belligerent youthful American-backed Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaido, whose putsch against Nicolas Maduro faltered on April 30 this year.
And he is better advised to watch Mthuli’s fiscal policy review at the end this month as he begins to steer the ship from austerity to more stable economic fairways to prosperity.
As the tide increasingly retreats, tichaonerera the soon-to-be exposed naked bathers.
Bishop out!
