Hundreds of Zimbos* fall for joke employment offer

Assiduous readers will know that Walt spent some years, before the turn of the century, knocking around Zimbabwe (the Rhodesia that was), watching a state becoming a failed state, before my very eyes. Almost everyone I knew there has since departed the country, or departed this life entirely So, to keep up with the news from the Dark Continent, I rely on my old chum, Dr CZ, who writes the second part of "Cabinet Files" in the Financial Gazette, every Thursday. It is Dr CZ who calls his compatriots "Zimbos", *meaning "Zimbabweans", nothing more or less.

In last week's column, Dr CZ invited Zimbos interested in assisting him in carrying out a strategic survey that he was planning to undertake to contact him as a matter of urgency. Here is the notice which appeared at the end of the column.

"This is very urgent. Dr CZ is looking for six Zimbos out there who are willing to help him with some strategic research that he will be conducting in the next few days. It is a three-day contract. Over and above being provided with transport, accommodation and meals, the assistants — who should be holders of at least any tertiary qualification — will each be paid an allowance of US$800 per day. The contract days are from the 29 to 31 of this month. Anyone interested should urgently e-mail their name and contact number to the e-mail below. The offer is strictly on a first-come-first-served basis."

The column appeared on February 23rd, and readers will note that the contract on offer was to run "from the 29 to 31 of this month". The joke should have been obvious to anyone who learned "30 days hath September...", but it seems post-colonial Zimbabwean education does not include any reference to that little saying. This week, Dr CZ reports on the aftermath, as follows...

"Although Dr CZ had just asked for those interested to submit their names and contact numbers for the piece of work that was to take place between February 29 and 31, as late as at the time of going to print this March, desperate emails were still trickling into his mail-box… most of them accompanied with bulky CVs and several phone numbers and dozens of the applicants are holders of several post graduate degrees. It was one of Dr CZ’s many asinine pranks that many of his fans took seriously. What was intended to start and end as just harmless mischief has turned out to be a real survey. The results of the survey show what happens when people become hopelessly desperate.

"If the applicants were mere village yokels who could hardly tell their left from right, one would have assumed that none of them knew that the dates on which the survey was supposed to take place do not exist on this side of the rainbow yet, but these are very educated men and women whose basic commonsensical reasoning has since been evaporated by the dire personal situations they find themselves in.

"Most of these people could be fathers and mothers, whom entire clans look upon. Yet they cannot do anything about their situation. This explains why seemingly normal people end up doing things that people in normal situations would not think possible. This perpetuates the abnormality that this country is increasingly getting known to be. This is the sad reality of the situation that this country has deteriorated to… never mind what officialdom says."

Quite right. 37 years after the perfidious British sold out Ian Smith's "white settler regime" to the darker-complected Africans, Zimbabwe has become a basket case... with the bottom now on the verge of falling out of the basket. With every passing day, Zimbabwe gets worse and worse. The Dark Continent gets ever darker.

Further reading: "Mugabe's corpse could win next Zimbabwe election, widow-to-be says", WWW 18/2/17.

Flogging a dead donkey

Every now and then, Walt comes across an amusing anecdote in Dr CZ's notebook, which appears most Thursdays in the (Zimbabwe) Financial Gazette. Here's a story that's worth retelling.

Herbert bought a donkey from Bongani for US$100 and asked him to deliver it the next day. The next day Bongani showed up on Herbert’s place. "Sorry Herbert," he said looking really sad. "The donkey died last night."

"Okay," said Herbert, "then just give me back my money."

"Sorry," pleaded Bongani, "I already spent it!"

"Damn it!" said Herbert. "In that case, bring me the dead donkey. After all, I did pay for it, so it's mine!"

Later that day, the carcass of the donkey was offloaded at Herbert’s house. A fortnight later, Bongani bumped into Herbert and, out of curiosity, asked him what he had done with the dead donkey.

"Oh, I raffled it," said Herbert. "I sold 251 tickets at $5 each and made a clean profit of $1150! I just made sure I didn't tell them the donkey was dead."

"But didn’t people complain?" asked Bongani in amazement.

"Only the chap who won," said Herbert, "so I gave him his $5 back."

Time to rethink how America relates to the world?

The following editorial comment by Walt's old buddy "CZ" appeared in the Financial Gazette, a more-or-less independent newspaper published in Harare, Zimbabwe.

This week the world joined America in celebrating the killing of Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader whose organisation is blamed for the September 2001 bombing of America.

Primitive as he might sound, CZ honestly thinks real victory (the real “momentous occasion”) will only come when Washington reviews the way it relates with other peoples of the world, which right now breeds resentment and has resulted in the proliferation of militant groups such as al-Qaeda and others.

Even with bin Laden dead, Americans — with all their money and weapons — will still not be able to go to bed peacefully because of this inkling that somewhere in the darkness lurks a person who is plotting something against them. And they will still have to sleep with one eye wide open and always walk with their backs firmly to the wall. This is not how life should be enjoyed.

The fact that it has taken the Americans with all their sophistication 10 long years to kill the al Qaeda leader means that he received sympathy, if not direct support, from a lot of people around the globe and these people will continue to support anything anti-American whenever they can.

Beneath the patina of wide diplomatic smiles, there is a deep-seated anti-American feeling and it is only the Americans who can do something useful about it. Just listen to the deafening silence with which the Arab world received the news of bin Laden’s death.

That silence was pregnant with meaning!

Postscript: Reuters reports today that the Taliban have unleashed a spring offensive in Afghanistan, meant to exact a measure of vengeance for the death of bin Laden. Target: Kandahar, due to be abandoned by Canadian forces in July.