The Sunday Mail
In the village, man and dog are as inseparable as hyenas and witches or fish and water.
As night sentries, dogs help to spook thieves and small predators, while during the day, they are worthy companions and hunters on occasion.
So dogs can really be a man’s best friend.
But there are times when this seemingly holy union is conveniently suspended, and one of them is during instances when a dog would have injudiciously decided to go after those nocturnal creatures called skunks (commonly known as chidembo).
You see, when skunks feel threatened they often release the most forbidding sulphurous stench imaginable from their rear, which is enough to keep even the most crazed of predators at bay.
Suffice to say, the stench can be deterrently damaging as a porcupine’s quills. Kikiki.
If the dog is unfortunate enough to be sprayed, it will spend days on end smelling like a skunk.
For the duration of this literally lingering curse, no sane human being would entertain it within smelling distance.
In cases where the afflicted dog seeks human companionship, it is met with squalls of bitter remonstrations and is violently waved away to a tolerable distance.
Man and dog will only reunite when the foul stench fades away, which seems to take an eternity.
However, in the Hobbesian life of the jungle, where life is often “nasty, brutish and short”, as every other animal is a potential meal for other animals up the food chain, the skunk does not only use its stinking attribute to ward off danger, but to catch prey as well, especially mice.
Not blessed with even the most decent speed that is needed to hunt down animals, skunks often deploy the most ingenious and lethal hunting method.
They corner mice or rats into seeking a secure — or so they think — hideout down the mouse hole, after which they gas the labyrinthine underground chambers with their noxious fumes.
Even when faced with lurking danger outside, the disoriented mice never have the stomach to ride it out and would inevitably stagger out into the “welcoming” and waiting arms of the skunk.
Easy-peasy! Kikikiki.
So, unlike cheetahs, they don’t have to run themselves silly to get a meal.
These are the wonders of nature.
Whenever Bishop Lazi thinks of this peculiar attribute of skunks, he cannot help but think of America, which invariably often profits from the crises it deliberately foments across the world.
In its geopolitical push to establish, secure and buttress Washington’s hegemony, foul is often regarded as fair.
A fatal misadventure
The world is currently writhing in pain, as it continues to literally pay a very high and extortionate price for the US’s misadventures in Eastern Europe, where an attempt to confront Russia in its backyard using Ukraine as a proxy has spectacularly backfired and spawned a gargantuan crisis that has put the whole world in a tailspin.
The whole world — from Timbuktu to Kalamazoo, as they say — is smarting from the fallout of hostilities in Ukraine.
Forgive the language, but it is fair to say the whole world is presently engulfed in a poo-storm from which we will all emerge foul and dirty.
Fuel prices — be it gas or oil — have been galloping and, with them, prices of food and basic commodities.
It doesn’t help that the belligerents —Russia and Ukraine — are major suppliers of fertilisers needed by farmers elsewhere and sunflower oil desperately sought by households around the world.
The socio-economic and political ramifications could be far deeper than anyone could have ever imagined, especially in a world that was already hobbling from the coronavirus pandemic, whose more than two-year-old spell on the world is still extant.
As the Bishop told you before, global health crises and conflicts are not mutually exclusive.
Crisis begets crises
Some governments have already begun collapsing.
The turmoil in the island nation of Sri Lanka in South Asia comes to mind.
Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaska resigned on May 9, ending the 76-year-old’s 20-year stint at the helm of the country’s politics, after a series of violent protests occasioned by a toxic combo of debilitating fuel shortages and stratospheric prices.
It is Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1948.
Shortages of LPG gas for cooking and fuel queues snaking around the capital, Colombo, have become commonplace.
It is also not looking any better in Europe, where inflation in countries such as Turkey has paced to a mammoth 70 percent, the highest in 20 years.
Our friends in the UK are similarly reeling, as inflation, at 9 percent, is not only staring double-digit territory but is now the highest it has ever been since March 1982 when the “Iron Lady”, Margaret Thatcher, was still prime minister.
For the average desperate Briton, who has to grapple with rising prices, nothing could have been as soul-sapping and grating as watching a sheepish, crest-fallen and forlorn-looking Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey — their version of our own Dr John Mangudya — last week saying he felt helpless in the face of the evolving crisis.
It’s a mess!
For the troublemaker-in-chief, America, which stoked flames of the crisis in Europe through NATO, the outlook was somewhat better than its allies.
Its inflation slowed to 8,3 percent in April from a 41-year high of 8,5 percent in March.
In typical skunkish behaviour, it is now forcing its spooked allies such as Taiwan, among others, to buy American-made weapons worth billions, and that way feeding its powerful and influential military-industrial complex dominated by companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Textron and Northrop Grumman Corp.
Overall, this is causing an arms race that is pushing world peace onto the precipice.
It stinks to the high heavens.
You do not need to be a prophet to see that the whooping US$40 billion that is being proposed to help Ukraine will essentially flow into pockets of American companies, which will obviously relish prospects of an intractable conflict that guarantees them more money.
The Bishop has never seen such a vile breed that exports misery around the world to secure happiness at home.
Everywhere they go, they live a trail of blood and tears. Just look at Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, et cetera.
Fat Cats
In this part of the world, which is more than 10 000 kilometres from besieged Kiev and safely ensconced from the conflagration in Eastern Europe, ordinary people like Bishop Lazi have been feeling the heat at the pump and in supermarkets.
Thankfully, Government has been nimble-footed through releasing fuel from its strategic reserves to temper price increases and guarantee supplies.
Blending ratios with ethanol are also progressively being hiked to further cool prices.
For now, we have enough wheat stocks, thanks to ED’s visionary leadership that led to a bumper haul of the cereal last year.
Meeting the envisaged 70 000-hectare target for the crop — crucial in making our daily bread — will help tide us over.
Just last week, the VP was in Indonesia and took the opportunity to try and secure palm oil directly from Jakarta, eliminating the inconvenient third parties that make the product pricier.
But, as usual, there is always that fly in the ointment to try to spoil it all.
Some of our fats cats in business, who have not unlearned the selfish and destructive habits of old, were at it again, trying to squeeze every penny for our people through all kinds of chicanery.
Hiding under the cover of the price increases, they have been unjustifiably inflating margins, claiming they were buying forex on the parallel market, itself an illegal practice.
But most producers of basic commodities have been getting Dr Mangudya’s cheap forex but still continue charging black market-indexed rates.
They use the Zimbabwe dollar that they disingenuously trash-talk as useless yet still use it to pay their workers, pay Zimra’s taxes, and utilities such as water and electricity.
They even get some supplementary US dollars from trading their products in foreign currency.
And much to the chagrin of some regional countries, Government has been insulating them from competition by arguing that fledgling businesses in a sanctioned jurisdiction such as Zimbabwe needed time to recover.
But after all this, they turn around and spit in Government’s face.
Well, we will see how this one will end. Hoo-hooo-doooo! Seka zvako muyera Shava!
Do you still remember the parable of that foolish rich bastard?
Luke 12: 17-21 is instructive: “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, `What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops. Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.
And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’
“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you.
Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”
And, as Bishop said last week, because of this America-manufactured global crisis, which is causing anxieties around the world, some American-sponsored NGOs such as the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition led by Peter Mutasa that recently got a tidy US$92 000 from regime-change architects National Endowment for Democracy think conditions are now favourable enough to launch a putschist movement in winter.
He is now hard-pressed to justify those 30 pieces of silver.
After the resounding failure of the proposed stayaway, he now thinks he will get joy by mobilising people to take to the streets. Kikikiki.
What a skunk!
The omnipresent men and women who live in the shadows hear, see and know everything.
Our politics will never be mediated on the streets but through the ballot.
Bishop out!
