The Sunday Mail
Howdy folks!
The Bishop is back!
Compliments of the new season, if it can be called that, for it seems as if we have unfortunately carried over our baggage from the past tumultuous year.
It looks and feels like a new year in name only.
Nevertheless, it is good to be back, especially after a restful and restorative hiatus, which always affords people like Bishop Lazi the opportunity to reflect on the past and divine the future.
The world is literally on fire.
It seems that now, more than at any other time in recent history, the world is on the precipice of peril.
Like Gazans, we also know the pain and grief of injustice
In the past four years, we have latched from one crisis or calamity to another, from the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war and the ongoing blitzkrieg by the Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip.
On the continent, the post-Omar al-Bashir Sudan, just like Libya after Muammar Gaddafi, continues to descend deeper into chaos.
So many people are needlessly dying across the world.
Phew!
But nowhere is the violence and killings so graphic, obscene, unconscionable, dastard and plainly evil than in the Gaza Strip, where the Israelis are clearly hell bent on annihilating the Palestinians, especially after the surprising and daring attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7 last year.
With two million people crammed in an area that is just a little more than 40-kilometres long and 10-kilometres wide, and bordered by the Mediterranean Sea, Gaza was once described as an “open prison”, but it has now turned into a literal human abattoir.
The Israelis have been mercilessly and relentlessly raining tonnes of bombs on everything and anything on that crowded enclave.
They say more than 45 000 bombs weighing close to 65 000 tonnes — which is more than the power of three nuclear bombs similar to those dropped by the Americans on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War 2 — have been dropped on Gazans.
Worse, it is estimated that about two-thirds of the bombs are unguided and imprecise (dumb bombs).
Schools, refugee camps, hospitals, ambulances, homes and even those that might possibly live to tell the tale are being bombed.
Of the estimated 24 000 Gazans that had been killed by Israel by last week, at least 82 were journalists, including those working for mainstream media organisations such as Reuters and Al Jazeera, proving that in some instances the sword can be mightier than the pen.
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that the siege on Gaza by Israel has gone beyond justifiable self-defence.
And for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyau, who might need to prolong the campaign against the Palestinians to distract against his own leadership failures that made the October 7 attacks possible, the current onslaught seems personal.
Not many people know that Netanyau’s brother, Yonatan, who, as Benjamin himself, was part of Sayeret Maktal — an elite Israeli commando unit that was created in the image of the British SAS (Special Air Service) — died in Uganda, at Entebbe Airport, on July 3, 1976, during a covert operation to free about 100 hostages on an Air France Flight that had been hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-External Operations and the German-based Revolutionary Cells.
The intriguing drama that ensued during the hostage rescue mission even inspired a film, “Raid on Entebbe”.
Four years earlier, in 1972, a then-22-year-old Benjamin, as part of the same unit (Sayeret Maktal), had taken part in an eerily similar operation, where four members of the Palestinian Black September group hijacked a Sabena Flight.
Suffice to say, Benjamin Netanyau, who is the leading the current brutal operation in Gaza, has a score to settle.
There are, however, many factors that are driving the ongoing genocidal campaign.
The bottom line is, Israel no longer wants to live side by side with the Palestinians and intends to “erase them from the face of the earth”.
They say officials from Israel were even having secret talks with several African countries to receive Palestinians from Gaza.
But why Africa; not Europe, America or Australia?
Bishop Lazi thinks they believe Africa is a hovel of the scum of the earth.
The British have since hatched what they think is an ingenious plan, where unwanted immigrants are redirected to Rwanda.
It is a consistent pattern.
In 1816, white Americans under the aegis of the American Colonisation Society, peeved by the growing number of free blacks, which they considered a problem, similarly decided to resettle them in Africa, which culminated in the formation of Liberia in 1847.
If you are African and do not see a problem with this racist and stereotypical pattern, then you are also a problem.
But kudos to the ANC government for showing the world that, as Africans, we also have agency.
Hauling Israel to the International Court of Justice was a diplomatic master stroke that opens the eyes of the world to the atrocities being committed by Tel Aviv, with the express support of the Americans.
The Bishop knows that South Africa, which is one of the close to 70 countries that will be holding elections this year, will definitely budget for a backlash, especially from Washington.
The two countries have been having testy diplomatic changes of late, not least because of SA ostensible siding with Russia after the outbreak of its war with Ukraine in February 2022.
Remember that America’s CIA was recently outed for trying to engineer the destabilisation of the ANC — Africa’s oldest liberation movement — as part of an elaborate plot to facilitate regime change.
However, the nascent emergence of a multi-polar world, as symbolised by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), will ultimately ensure that America, which likes to masquerade as the world’s policeman, will not ride roughshod on other sovereign member states, no matter how small and weak they might seem.
A time to heal and grow
As Zimbabwe, we do not need to be told about the callousness of the US, which slapped us with sanctions at the turn of the millennium.
For more than 22 years, we have known the pain and grief that comes with sanctions.
Although a lot has changed in the past two decades to warrant their removal, and that is if they were warranted at all, the deleterious coercive measures remain extant.
But thankfully, there is a time for everything — and our time has come.
Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8 says: “There is a time for everything, and everything on earth has its special season. There is a time to be born and a time to die. There is a time to plant and a time to pull up plants. There is a time to kill and a time to heal.
“There is a time to destroy and a time to build. There is a time to cry and a time to laugh. There is a time to be sad and a time to dance . . . There is a time to tear apart and a time to sew together. There is a time to be silent and a time to speak. There is a time to love and a time to hate. There is a time for war and a time for peace.”
For us, it is a time to build, grow and develop.
The strides that we are making in developing Zimbabwe have become difficult to ignore.
Bretton Woods institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — enduring symbols of the Western world — have even grudgingly acknowledged the country’s economic growth trajectory over the past five years under President ED.
Last year, our economy is estimated to have grown by more than 5,5 percent, notwithstanding the global headwinds of rising inflation and softening commodity prices, a feat that shows the indomitable willpower, resilience and determination of Zimbabweans.
Though hamstrung, we continue to plow ahead.
Although growth was expected to somewhat slow this year because of the El Niño weather phenomenon, it turns out the heavens might be in a good and generous mood with the rains, which means our agricultural production might be better-than-expected.
Many key projects in mining will be coming on stream this year, adding the much-needed fillip to economic growth.
Tick Tock, Tick Tock
However, for those interested in the Zimbabwean story, it is important to observe what is happening in local authorities, most of which remain trapped in a time warp and are perilously underestimating Government’s determination to deliver services that people deserve.
The myriad of challenges facing our cities, such as potholes, absence of street lighting, uncollected garbage, rotting recreational facilities, unGodliness, disorder and chaos, among others, have created a climate of opinion that the progress that we are making as a country is not being felt by communities.
It has made some residents sceptical and cynical.
Well, the so-called city fathers should put their act together by mid-year by doing the needful — doing their job.
They have already been put on notice.
They should know that those who now hold the levers of power are men and women of consequence.
They do not just huff and puff — they are doers known for their grit and graft.
The time to change the face of our cities is now.
Do not say Bishop Lazi didn’t warn you.
Bishop out!
