A lotto dream

A lotto dream

• A tale of broken resolutions

• My Top Ten: what I miss about home

• The truth about life in the UK

• Blessed are those with passports...

• The only time I wish I was in Zimbabwe

• Tribal hang-ups must cease

• A nation locked in negativism

• Zimbabwe's scattered marriages

• Now recruiting: traditional healers and prophets

• The double life of exiled Zimbabweans

By Norah Spie

HOME is supposed to be the place where you are always welcome, a place where you do not need any booking or give notice of your arrival.

But what happens when you are now afraid to go home? Who do you turn to when you fear the same place you love dearly? I have been facilitating an unscientific poll on my personal site www.norahspie.com asking when people living outside Zimbabwe intend to go back.

The majority said within five years and the second highest number of people said they would go back whenever there is a change of government. The number of people who said they would never go back was equal to those who said they would go back in ten years time.

I am assuming that those who said 'never' and those who are waiting for change of government are what the present government calls 'enemies of the state' so even if they wanted to go back now, they cannot.

There is also a number of people who were traumatised by events in Zimbabwe that they have chosen not to call it home anymore. It is a shame and it must be hard to be in such a situation, but we are adults who are free to make our own choices.

My interest is in those who think they will be going back in 5 years time. I wonder if they made this decision from their heart or was it well thought out plan involving the head? The heart is forgiving, the heart is tolerant, the heart will go on. But the problem starts when you start to analyse what you could be going back for. Money is always the number one thing and then comes the little but still important things like shortages of fuel and the power blackouts.

Then comes security issues and health matters. And then it occurs to you that your children might not get into good schools because you might not be able to afford it. Then it starts to get scary but you think of the millions who are living there and the thousands in the cities like Harare who are just managing. If they can, why can't I? Common sense then tells you that the key is to go back with as much money as possible but you've heard of a story of so and so who went with lots of cash and lost it in a failed business and ever demanding relatives.

Then you comfort yourself by saying you will start a less risky business. So you give yourself another year or two to save the money for your big home-coming. At the same time your life has to continue in the country where you are. Your landlord is not going to give you a grace period because you need all your money so you can go back home. The year goes by so fast because as well as paying for your living expenses, you still have to support those at home.

Before you know it, it is a new year and your resolution is to cut down on any luxuries and be serious about saving. It is the same resolution you made last year. Time is not waiting on you. You become more and more anxious. You start to be angry. Who is responsible for putting you in this situation? As if you don't have enough to make you go insane, your friends back home or those in South Africa keep bragging about how they have made it, sending you pictures of their mansions. Telling you how they have just come back from holiday in Cape Town and that they are going to Dubai in April and might stay in that 'all gold' seven-star hotel.

Your head is spinning. You have sleepless nights trying to come up with a plan that will get you out of the mud. Then it hits you that you don't necessarily have to go back home, but your heart sinks and your head says you have no plan so stay where you are or else you are going back to poverty. The same poverty you ran away from. Everyone will laugh at you.

There goes another year, then you start to resent Zimbabwe. Everything about it! You stop to read any news from home. Your calls home are now limited. But life has to go on, so you go back to living the routine life in your adopted country, back to abusing Stella Artois or Carling, back to partying every other night.

You quit the other job, keep one and take it easy. Upgrade your car, throw a party and invite people you don't know. Then it hits you, Lottery! Why didn't you think of that before? All these years, surely you could have won something by now. So you vow to play Lotto twice a week and, if and when you win then you will go back to Zimbabwe. What are the chances?
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Tongues have been wagging among top Zimbabwean journalists this week after some serious allegations of sexual harassment and rape in the newsrooms were published.

The allegations however are from many years ago, the generation I call 'old school' literally and metaphorically. Some of the allegations are from the 1980s. This is mainly because the main media institutions in Zimbabwe have been run by roughly the same people since Independence. There is no expiry date on a crime. If people are still talking of Gukurahundi, then surely a woman should be able to speak if she was assaulted a decade ago.

Sexual harassment is very common among the very cultures that claim to have 'good morals' -- the Africans, Indians, South Americans. You also find that women are marginalised in these cultures under the name of tradition and culture. A woman's life was made hard from the on-set but we were also made stronger to be able to deal with the hardships.

All over the world, the media industry is notorious for being one of the toughest to break into. It is fiercely dominated by men. But like everything else, for it to run smoothly, women have to be involved.

I believe men generally behave badly and not just in the media industry. Think of any field, be it in education or sports. We have heard of stories that if a female teacher wants to be placed in a good school then she might have to give in to the regional education officer, who in most cases is male. The same thing happens in the banking sector or any other place, if you come to think of it.

I personally think there is a large number of women who are too submissive, too desperate, too lazy, too weak, too greedy to wait for that promotion or get that job in the right channel so they surrender to men in power. These women overshadow the ones that are trying to live and work in the straight and narrow.

Women have the power but unfortunately most of us do not realise this. The gender issue is more like the racial issue. An intimidated race tends to suppress another race that threatens to give them more competition so they find ways of making the brighter race feel inferior.

That said, I think it is up to the abused women to come out and finger the perpetrators of this abuse. Some of the reckless name-dropping that has come with these revelations is unhelpful and defeats the noble idea of exposing a bad practise at the work place.
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A male reader wrote to me this week saying he thought Arthur Mutambara's 2007 Agenda speech was 'gender insensitive'. Mutambara referred to some Zanu PF officials as ‘Mugabe’s wives’.

The gentleman wanted to know my thoughts on it. I am not hyper-sensitive so I could not see anything 'insensitive' about Mutambara's points.

There is a certain group of people who will find offence in anything. Was it not Margaret Dongo, that fervent feminist who first used that same phrase almost a decade ago?

Norah Spie's new weekly column appears here every Wednesday. You can e-mail her at n_spie@hotmail.com or visit her website www.norahspie.com

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