At the time when some in the cabinet announced by President Mugabe today were first appointed ministers, I was still herding cows barefoot in the dusty plains of Manyene.
Bill Gates was a college dropout tinkering with an operating system called PC-DOS unwanted by the world's biggest computer maker, IBM. HP were yet to make laser printers let alone become the biggest desktop computer vendor in the world. Apple were yet to start selling the now famous MacIntosh computer brand. The iPad and iPhone could not even have been imagined by the engineers of the time.
At that time I never imagined a life beyond digging for roots (fifi and magwiredembo), and consider myself an expert at then seemingly all important life skills like setting traps (kuteya misungo, mariva nezvikirimbani) and making homestead tools like cooking sticks and yoke sticks.
My life has since moved on. I don't know when I last wielded an adze (mbezo). A day spent without touching a keyboard is an abnormal day in my life.
The world has also moved on. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are dead. The John Majors, Tony Blairs, Bill Clintons and a whole clan of Bushes have stepped into and out of the limelight. Prestroika happened and Mikhail Goberchev went with it. The Russian drunkard, Boris Yeltsin also came and went. After all of them Putin even had the time to perform a now-you-see-me, now-you-don't and now-you-see-me-again trick.
However not so for the Zimbabwe cabinet. Sometime in 1980 I attended St Nicholas school at Mahusekwa for 1 term of my turbulent life. Everything about the school and the place has long since been forgotten. However there is one enduring memory. Enerst Kadungure and Sydney Sekeremayi came to address a meeting at Mahusekwa township and us school children were let off early to attend the meeting.
One was wearing a cream safari suit and the other a light blue safari suit. I sat fascinated as they chanted slogans (Pamberi neZanu!) and literally promised to bring heaven down to us. I was a grade 5 pupil then.
Right now I have just spotted another grey hair on my head (those things are becoming too numerous to pluck out). And Sydney Sekeremayi has just been appointed a minster again!
They say if you breathe the same pocket of air for a long time, it will become stale and you will die from lack of oxygen.
What happens if you appoint the same people into a country's cabinet again and again?
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