via A country in waiting – The Zimbabwean 20.11.2015
Dear Family and Friends,
Going from a first world to a third world country is always a trip of mixed emotions, culture shock and confusing adjustments. On the last leg of the journey from anywhere to Zimbabwe you know you’re almost home because rules suddenly go out the window.
One piece of cabin baggage on the plane is ignored as people heft two, three or more bulging bags on board; weight restrictions are disregarded and as for queues – not a chance! Suddenly it becomes a free for all as people push and shove determined to get in before you, get out before you, get in front of you. Witnessing this behavior can’t help but make you feel ashamed to be a Zimbabwean.
The moment your feet hit the tarmac you have to immediately re-learn the rules of being in a distrustful society. Instead of there being two or three speedy queues for returning residents at Harare airport, there is only one line which snakes its way across the arrivals hall and soon a hundred or more exhausted travelers wait, and wait and wait to get to the front. You find yourself looking at your feet to avoid catching the eyes of frustrated foreigners who shake their heads and sigh loudly at the bureaucracy and equally slow queue for visitors.
More absurdity awaits. After taking your luggage off the carousel, instead of being able to choose green or red entry routes, everyone must queue all over again. This line is even longer because now residents and tourists are all in the same queue.
When you finally get to the front you must lift your luggage onto a conveyor where the contents are scanned: scrutinized by tax collectors searching for anything that may yield a dollar or two in revenue. Once through with the formalities you head for the toilet where you find a door with no lock, only one of three hand basins has water, the soap dispenser doesn’t work and neither does the hand dryer.
Hello Zimbabwe! What a way to be welcomed into our beautiful country where the first rain in seven months has fallen, cooling the baked ground, dampening the choking dust. From nowhere the rain brings sausage flies and giant moths. In the mornings the ground is littered with shimmering, discarded flying ant wings. Mousebirds, louries, barbets and spectacled weavers gorge themselves on ripe figs while high up in a Musasa tree a pair of Scops Owls look down, wide eyed and accusing.
After weeks away nothing has changed: electricity is unlikely, water is rare but the politicians are too busy to care as they continue to scramble for positions in the silent succession war. We remain a country in waiting: waiting for everything from water and electricity to growth, jobs and prosperity, but most of all waiting for truly free
and fair elections and political change.
I end with a message of condolence and support to people in France
after a week of horror in which so many innocent people were murdered. Like you we know how it feels to know the perpetrators of horror are walking amongst us, living in our neighbourhoods and we share your pain. Until next time, thanks for reading, love cathy. 20 November 2015. Copyright � Cathy Buckle. www.cathybuckle.com <http://www.cathybuckle.com/>
COMMENTS
Admitted, there are challenges in Zimbabwe but it remains one of the most peaceful places on earth. The weather is just amazing. Most of our people are very hardworking, progressive and well meaning. We have learnt how to embrace the good and not so good and remain hopeful that our economy will improve in the near future. Contrary to the propaganda spread against our beloved country daily, we are not sitting on our laurels deteriorating into the abysses of poverty, we are a hardworking lot who are doing their best to improve from where we are.
God bless Zimbabwe
Your comment is positive and good, because we must be positive but we must also be knowledgeable and aware. So as for propaganda they say there is no smoke without fire. Prophet Hosea 4: 6 declared the word from God that “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”. Controlling and oppressing the media in order to keep your subjects ignorant of the facts is not democratic because a leader is not a creator of humanity but is only there to lead and not oppress his subjects. To be believing that propaganda is being spread about Zimbabwe in this day and age is to be lacking in knowledge and exactly what the oppressive government wanted to achieve. When you are a football player in the pitch you don’t see the facts that the spectators see. Stay informed so you know how to pray and be blessed.
Thank you Cathy for your update. It is very factual. However, who are we as a country and a people, waiting for? Facts and Truth are two different words with a different meaning. My own interpretation is that facts are based on what you see with your eyes but the truth is based on what you see with your spiritual eyes and this is what God sees and says as opposed to what you see and say.
What you have portrayed is factual. The truth is change can only happen if you and I hook up with God and see what HE sees. Remember God is the Creator of heaven and earth and of all in it. “The earth is the LORD’s, the world all they who dwell in it… Psalm 24: 1”
When Adam disobeyed God the Creator’s instructions, God did not destroy him or abandon him, He had a solution for him. HE is a God of hope. He gave us Hope in Christ. Christ gave us the power of the Holy Ghost when we received Him, which is advisable to do for everyone because the Holy Ghost teaches us everything we need to know. He gives us life, faith, power, wisdom and most of all creativity. You and I in Christ, are the temple of God because HIS SPIRIT dwells in us. We have the power of creation in us to change things in Zimbabwe (1 Corinthians 3: 16). We have to use that power to visualise change. We have to use that power to visualise the best because we belong to the Best God and the Most High God who is the first cause of everything.
Let us therefore think positively and begin to seek the face of God for change not only in our country but in the whole world, because the earth in the LORD’s and He has given it to us. As believers in Christ, we are not to be limited by what we see with our eyes of the flesh because we have the power of the Creator inside of us, we can create our world! Does that sound better and hopeful.
Therefore beloved, let us see our country for what it can be if we want it to be. Let us not be limited by the negativity before our fleshly eyes right now but let us be empowered by the creative power of God within each of us, to bring change in our land. Everything is possible for one who believes! Mark 9: 23. Let us use the tools that JESUS gave us to access His Kingdom… Matthew 16: 19 “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose/release on earth, shall be loosed/released in heaven.” Jesus also instructed us, “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it will be done for you by my Father in Heaven.” You see, we are not left powerless but we are moving power houses, God’s Agents of Change!
Therefore, let us get busy and drop the complaining and the whining. When you put God first in your business, think generationally and think of those helpless around you; remove your focus on your own suffering and think of what God has promised those who put their trust in Him and stop feeling intimidated but rely on the power of your Creator, who loves you and cares about everything right now in your life, my friend CHANGE will happen. Begin to plan BIG and think BIG. Is there anything too hard for GOD? He sees ahead of you and ahead of those that oppress you, remember.
The kingdom of God is not by buying and selling but buy sowing and reaping; Sow love and peace, give your time to others, if you can give money do but there whatever you sow you are guaranteed a harvest. Those who sow strife will reap just that. “For evil doers shall be cut off, but those who wait on the LORD shall inherit the earth; the meek shall inherit the earth and they shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace…Psalm 37: 9, 11”
Let us not be weary in well doing but in good time we shall reap. There is no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear. God has not given us the spirit of fear but of power, of love and of a sound mind. LET US THINK of those unjustly imprisoned and pray for their deliverance. We have a lot of praying to do and of planning to do. Let us get busy planning for our future and for the future of our country; Plan BIG and Present those plans in prayer to our God the Creator of Heaven and Earth. I can assure you as He has assured us in His Word (3 John 2) that health and prosperity shall come to us and to our land. Facts and The Truth are not the same. God’s Word is the TRUTH. HE is not a man that He should lie…Numbers 23: 19. God bless you and all who read.
WE REAP WHAT WE SOW
Rwanda Hopes French Officials Will Be Indicted For War Crimes
LAST UPDATED ON THURSDAY, 07 AUGUST 2008 17:05 THURSDAY, 07 AUGUST 2008 17:03
Rwanda’s information minister said Wednesday she hoped a raft of French political and military officials accused of playing a role in the country’s 1994 genocide would soon be indicted for war crimes.
A 500-page report released Tuesday by Kigali alleged that France was aware of preparations for the genocide, and that French forces in Rwanda contributed to planning the massacre and actively took part in the killing.
“The government has asked the courts to to use this report. We hope that legal proceedings will follow,” Information Minister Louise Mushikiwabo said. “It is up to the courts to take it up. We hope to make progress,” she added.
Quoted separately in Britain’s Financial Times newspaper on Wednesday, she explained the report would be considered by the public prosecutor as the basis for indictments which could lead to the first attempts by an African nation to extradite European nationals for alleged war crimes.
“We don’t believe any French citizen or other citizen is above the law, especially when it comes to crimes as serious as genocide,” she said.
“We hope the French will take this report as seriously as Rwanda has taken it and, when the indictments come out, will co-operate.” IBUKA, a Rwandan association for genocide survivors, urged France to prosecute its citizens accused in the report.
“The French judiciary should be the first to bring French criminals to justice,” said its president Theodore Simburudari.
“There should be legal proceedings so that the guilty are punished and reparation is paid to the victims,” he said.
The report named former French prime minister Edouard Balladur, former foreign minister Alain Juppe and the then-president Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996, among 13 French politicians accused of playing a role in the massacres.
Dominique de Villepin, who was then Juppe’s top aide and later became prime minister, was also among those listed in the Rwandan report, which names 20 military officials as being responsible.
Its release comes against a backdrop of tense relations between France and Rwanda since the severing of diplomatic ties in November 2006.
That act followed accusations from French investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere that Rwandan President Paul Kagame – a Tutsi – and his entourage were responsible for the death of his predecessor Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu.
Habyarimana’s plane was shot down above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994, sparking the genocide.
In July, Kagame had threatened to indict French nationals over the genocide if European courts did not withdraw arrest warrants issued against Rwandan officials.
Rwandan Foreign Minister Rosemary Museminali, speaking at a press conference in Kigali on Tuesday, suggested the new report accusing
France of involvement in the genocide could be used to clear the air between the two nations.
“France should also be able to use this report. For diplomacy, it is a very good basis, the relationship between Rwanda and France should be
based on the truth. The talks still go on,” she said.
France, meanwhile, accused Rwanda of making “unacceptable accusations” by alleging that Paris played an active role in the genocide, but said it was still determined to rekindle ties with Kigali.
The 1994 genocide in the central African nation left around 800,000 people – mainly minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus – dead, according to the United Nations.
Why do Zimbabweans still think they should be better of then say Zambians or Malawians? Those two countries have accepted decades ago their fate as Africans.
A prosperous Rhodesia and South Africa will just be a footnote in history.
Zimbabwe has greater mineral, agricultural and tourist potential with a still reasonable though deteriorating infrastructure compared to Zambia and Malawi. The vast diamond wealth could have been used to pump prime the economy for the benefit of all, with good management. That is what is so sad and frustrating. Greed and corruption. Take out 500 key Zanu and the country would rejoice and start over….at least in the dreams of many!!
@Mugarbage
You disengage yourself completely from any rapport with cogent discussion through your inane statements.
For decades, the Brits thought the Chinese should accept their fate as, “Chinese” i.e. inferior to the Brits.
Now the Brits are going cap in hand to the same “savages”.
I got to accept that Mambosasa is a few bushels short of the real deal but you are not far off in that department.