The Sunday Mail
Having grown up in a very productive village, the Bishop knows all too well about the notoriety of nuisance greedy baboons, especially during the cropping season.
Being assigned to fend-off these marauding and daring mammals from the lush green budding maize crop fields is perhaps the most tortuous and emotionally taxing task that one can ever be condemned to do.
It is, however, the primitive greed of these troublesome pests that is as shocking as it is disconcerting.
Bishop Lazi and his peers noticed the baboons’ common trait, particularly on occasions when they would break through our defensive lines. They would rapaciously grab armfuls of plump cobs and staggeringly try to escape; but usually, whenever their ever-wandering eyes caught sight of the most plump and juiciest cobs, they would nonsensically drop their loot and go for the lusted crop.
Incredible
But gratuitous greed is not restricted to baboons, it courses through the veins of all mammalian life — especially human beings.
So egregious is human greed that by last year, only one percent of the global population controlled 82 percent of the wealth generated worldwide, according to Oxfam International (the confederation of non-governmental organisations).
Most of us snugly fit into the hoi polloi that make up the chaff of the remaining 99 percent.
Callous
But these are mere statistics that become more graphic in our lived realities, where, in the middle of such reeking poverty, some of our kinsmen have the audacity to construct sprawling palatial homes that seem to spite the poor.
The Bishop got an excruciatingly painful reality check when he decided to use his stipend to shop for some odds and ends in one of the supermarkets in town.
As had become routine, he reached for the shopping basket at the entrance and began his slaloming walk up and down the aisles.
From the first aisle, he began feeling groggy. By the time he reached the last one, he was already feeling weak-kneed.
The vertiginous prices — with a 10kg bag of mealie-meal now at $50 — in our supermarkets and tuck-shops, are enough to even put the brave-hearted in a coma.
One is unfailingly driven to ask: what exactly is causing all this pricing chaos?
How can the exchange rate suddenly spiral out of control in a fortnight?
Who is behind all this?
And how is it possible that the freezing of a few individuals’ accounts can calm the markets?
So what has to be done?
The questions are unending.
Remember my June sermon when I warned about the havoc that is being caused by Gucci comrades and their prawn-munching ilk?
Yes, these comrades are still with us.
They chant slogans with us during the day, but at night they untiringly scheme to take advantage of the system for their own personal benefit.
Indeed, they work at cross-purposes to what ED and his Government intend to achieve simply because far-reaching reforms, which are most likely to upend the current skewed status quo, would inevitably wean them off the feeding trough that has sustained them for decades.
For them, reforms become an existential question — a matter of life and death — and so they fight back the best way they know how.
For the country, breaking the back of such malfeasance, which is also key to determining success of the ongoing policies, is also an existential question.
So it is really a battle of wills.
Having built filthy riches over the past two decades and invested in money-printing strategic sectors of the economy, these influence-peddlers believe that everyone and everything has a price.
They buy powerful — nay, very powerful — friends across the political divide; they buy Lady Justice to look the other way; they buy newsmen to see and hear no evil; they buy law enforcers so that they remain blind to their indiscretions; and worse of all, they buy foreign currency on the black market.
And all this is wrecking people’s lives, particularly the vulnerable.
As ED recently questioned, how is it possible for currency manipulators to conduct their damaging enterprises right under the nose of institutions that are mandated to ensure the integrity of local markets?
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, Zimra and other law enforcement agents should grow a spine.
All these supposedly clever-and-half individuals, who are causing a lot of suffering to ordinary Zimbabweans, have to be frogmarched to prison.
In fact, they deserve to be pilloried in the city centre.
After amassing a fortune over the years, why do they still want to primitively accumulate more?
Is it not time for them to walk the straight and narrow?
They have to, need to, or have to be forced to.
Justice
But as we all know, greed is a very stubborn trait.
We can only hope that Lady Justice will exorcise it.
She has to use her unsheathed double-edged blade to enforce justice, including her blindfold to ensure impartiality and objectivity of the law.
Mindful of the presumption of innocence, the Bishop will not name this greedy clique.
Comeuppance will however come soon enough.
He will just leave them with wise words from Luke 12:15-21.
“Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.
“And he (Jesus) told them this parable: The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. 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 my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain 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 whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich towards God.”
Well, as the UK Attorney-General Geoffrey Cox said last week: “The time is coming when even these turkeys (read Gucci comrades, in this case) won’t be able to prevent Christmas.”
No night is so long that it won’t end in dawn.
Bishop out!
