The Sunday Mail
How can one make a deadbeat useful during this time of the year?
Well, that is pretty easy.
You only have to promise them a beer for either watering or weeding the garden and the task will be completed in a jiffy.
No one can be as obliging or acquiescing as someone craving for a puff or a beer, especially when they are dead broke.
They can do anything, from doing the dishes, laundry and other menial and manual tasks such as chopping firewood just to get a fix.
However, one has to be careful not to give men of such uncontrolled passions any money as this can release the raging demons within them.
Now that Christmas Day and New Year’s Day are behind us, a semblance of normalcy is slowly returning.
Those individuals who were so difficult to find home at the beginning of the festive season are now almost always available.
Their taste seems to have also changed.
While they used to revel in whiskeys and lager beer, they now seem to be all too happy to make do with daily doses of masese (opaque beer).
One has to be careful not to make unannounced visits during this time of the year as people’s provisions will be running out.
“Pakadai apa hapadi vaenzi because they will not understand it when we eat sadza with eggs or just take salted rice before retiring to bed,” some acquaintances said during an elders’ meeting at church recently.
“This is not the right time to visit relatives and friends. Before setting about visiting anyone, please assess that the visit is absolutely necessary because you may cause people challenges. Some will even refuse to welcome you,” a neighbour told me recently.
As men’s fortunes take a dip, women are naturally elated as their husbands are now spending more time at home.
“No! He is not sick at all. He is nursing a sick pocket and his mood has changed. He is now spending time with us and I wish he would stay broke so that I get this love and attention which was almost difficult to get when he was loaded,” I heard a woman confiding in her peers.
“He is now a perfect gentleman. Money was threatening to separate us,” she added in jest.
She is not the only one celebrating.
“At least my husband now appreciates that he is married because he is now even driving me and the children to church. That was unheard of when he was flush with cash in December. This January disease has reignited the embers of our love.
“He is now even religiously taking his meals because he no longer has cash for the braai and beer,” quipped another lady who identified herself as Mai Mhofu.
Owing to shallow pockets, some previously voluble men have since lost their voices and can now readily tuck into anything that their spouses would have prepared.
“He never used to take meals without meat. He would even shout his voice hoarse if I served him vegetables, but now he even asks for pumpkin leaves (muboora), nyevhe and other seasonal delicacies like ishwa (flying ants).
“This is the most difficult period of the year and I pray that we will pull through, but for now I am just enjoying my marriage. I did not know that without money and anywhere to go, a man can be home before sunset,” said one woman called MaSibanda in Kambuzuma.
Gentle reader, January disease, whose symptoms usually manifest when people have very little to spare, is a novel disease during this time of the year.
But what makes it excruciatingly painful this time around is the coronavirus pandemic, which has limited entertainment across the world.
With little sport to watch and being restricted at home, January will be especially painful.
Reports that schools will remain close until further notice will even make it worse.
All the same, we look forward to the new year with renewed hope.
Happy New Year!
Inotambika mughetto.
Feedback: [email protected]
