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We’ve a constipated economy

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I need not elaborate on the pain of having constipation but one thing is for sure – it’s never a good feeling.

I live with a Doctor and listen to all sorts of horror stories in the evening after work. I guess it’s some sort of a de-junking session. I listen to so many stories that I’ve somehow become a doctor by default. At this stage, I’m sure I can prescribe paracetamol or acetaminophen commonly known as Panado. You see, I even know the terms.
I

was once told a hilarious story of an attempted hijacking gone wrong and surely this one wins the trophy by far. This was when one gentleman attempted to hijack a vehicle somewhere in Pretoria and got shot in the abdomen.

This was obviously an emergency and the hijacker had to be rushed to the hospital with hands cuffed to the stretcher. When the hijacker arrived in the hospital emergency room, a team of doctors and senior nurses was quickly assembled to start the operation. Well, no one wanted to assist a criminal to survive a near death experience but they had all taken an oath to save lives.

So, during the operation and procedure to remove the bullet in the abdomen, the professor asked for the dosage of the anesthetic to be reduced gradually so that the hijacker gets back to his senses. The professor said, “I want to teach this bugger a lesson”. And slowly, slowly, slowly, the dosage of the anesthetic was reduced and the hijacker gained consciousness until he woke up.

The stomach was fully opened with intestines fully exposed so you can imagine the horror of a person that lost consciousness when he attempted to hijack a vehicle in town, only to wake up in a room full of people in gowns, a policeman sitting in the corner and his stomach open, intestines fully exposed and his hands cuffed to the hospital bed. It must have felt like a scene from a horror movie or a real nightmare.

So, when the hijacker finally woke up and saw his open stomach opened, he shouted and cried out loud in horror. The senior nurses, bo-sister, were there to tell the criminal a thing or two. They kept on saying, “Yes! Le sele hampe. Le tla tsoela ho utsoa ntho tsa batho”. Meaning, you criminals are so silly. You will learn to stop crime the hard way.

Yes, it was a hilarious story to listen to and a story that I’ll never forget but I’m sure that the poor guy couldn’t believe his eyes. The moral of the story was that crime does not pay and the nurses removed a thing or two from their chests. This could be a good lesson for our politicians here at home.
Yes, those are the stories I listen to on a daily basis and I have somehow become a master of the human anatomy. But one thing that fascinates me is how food is processed in the stomach and nutrients delivered in the body.

Without starting to sound like Tšepang Ledia on the next page, we can all agree on the pain caused by constipation. This is a feeling that one gets, when the stomach feels so full but nothing comes out on a toilet visit. It is such a lousy feeling and we’ve all experienced the feeling. One way or the other.

This is the same thing that happens in our economy. Our economy is so busy but nothing comes out at the end of the financial year in terms of tax revenue or even jobs. Nothing!
We have a busy economy. Government vehicles are always busy moving up and down. Ministers are always on LTV cutting ribbons. Sometimes even cutting ribbons for an opening of a community tap. Yes, an opening of a tap to demonstrate that water can come out.

Haai! The things we see on LTV!
If it’s not government officials on LTV, it is the diplomatic corps or development partners trying to demonstrate how useful they are. Please!
Businessmen and women are busy. Some of them like myself, spend the whole year printing “I hereby” proposals that gather dust on desks of Ministers and PS’s.

Trucks loading cement, beer, maize-meal and fuel crisscross the country to make deliveries. From the outside, this looks like a very busy economy but when it is time to produce results, dololo! Nothing comes out.
This situation can be reckoned to those students that study so hard but keep on failing every time a test is written. We all know them. They would never attend a party or go anywhere. They are always in the library even during odd hours of the evening but come exam time, dololo! No good results and this would be so heartbreaking considering the time, effort and sacrifices made.

I don’t know why I seem to be the only one concerned about our low tax revenue collection. Not even the Commissioner General from the Lesotho Revenue Authority (LRA) nor the Minister of Finance seem to be perturbed by this trend. It is as if they’ve said, “We already know that we are going to fail and there is no need to study harder”. And this is deeply concerning.
Our young people were out to spark protest under the theme or hash-tag Bacha shut-down. But what I found sad is that our young people are desperate for jobs and rightfully so but the economy is not performing, as it should in order to create jobs.

Secondly, our young people keep on making the same old mistakes. One, they don’t vote come election time. In fact, they never vote. Point number two, they think that the government will do something to solve their problems. Now, let’s put this into perspective.

One, you don’t vote and expect someone you didn’t vote for to put bread on your table. How is that even possible? But the youth are correct to protest. A job is a basic human right but our politicians don’t give a damn about the economy and let me tell you why.
Our politicians believe that they can run an economy without tax revenue collection. This is like attempting to drive a car without petrol. Taxes are the petrol for running a vehicle called government and why are taxes important?

If we have less activity in the economy, like trade, buying and selling of goods, we’ll have low VAT collection and subsequently, less corporate tax from companies. If less people are economically active and the unemployment rate is high, we’ll have less or lower collections of Personal Income Tax.

Tax revenue is at the core of enabling government to operate. That is the main source for salaries of public servants. That is where the money to build schools comes from. That is the money used to build roads, bridges and to connect electricity in villages. Without tax revenue, the government becomes dysfunctional.

Our economy gives an output of about of M5.5 billion per annum in domestic tax revenue collection. That is a collection of domestic taxes in terms of Value-added Tax (VAT), Pay As You Earn (Personal income tax) and company or corporate taxes. No, here is our problem.
With the low tax revenue collections that we have, our MPs still want a pay rise. Hao banna! Even the Senators have joined this choir and they are singing a tenor.

The Senators have been on LTV protesting about all sorts of things, from low salaries to not having I-pads. In a way, they were trying to say we want more money and we demand I-pads. Kids want jobs and parents demand I-pads. The kind of leaders we have in this country!

Well, it is nice to have more money in the pocket and to have I-pads but with money from where? Really, with money from where? Our economy is not generating enough cash for us to have the luxury to increase salaries sporadically.

Allow me to paint this picture. Botswana, collects well over M60 billion in tax revenue and we only manage to collect about M5.5 billion and maybe M7 billion on a good day. Look at the disparity for a country that was way ahead of Botswana 40 years ago.

Now, to demonstrate how dire the situation is, the Lesotho government has to pay M500 million towards government employees (civil servant salaries), each month. Each month! And that goes to about M6 billion per annum on salaries alone. Remember that LRA could only collect M5.5 billion per annum. So, if you want a salary increase, where will the money come from? With money from where? Diamond sales? Water royalties?

These are issues that should be raised in the National Assembly. But none of the MPs are really concerned about the issues unless Honourable Ts’ita Mosena raises them. Is she the only voice of reason in Parliament?
This is where the need to stimulate the economy comes in and this is where the need to engage the private sector arises. Government cannot do it on its own. The government needs to remember that the role of creating jobs is in the hands of the private sector and not the public sector.

In closing, we seem to make money in order to flush it down the drain. It is time to stop the leakages in our economy and start creating an economy that will work and generate results in terms of more tax revenue and jobs. At the moment, our economy needs a laxative named the private sector!

‘Mako Bohloa

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Insight

Shining Like Stars: Part One

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Last week, in a piece titled “Hope Springs Eternal”, I wrote about the relative values of (leftist) political commitment and Christian faith in a world that is beset with violence, poverty and oppression. Now I’m offering a review of a book by Lindsay Brown titled Shining Like Stars: The power of the gospel in the world’s universities, which explores the work of evangelical students in propagating the Christian faith in some of the world’s most dangerous countries, such as Columbia, China, Russia, Sudan and the DRC. Countries where despair seems to be a pretty rational response to the lives that huge numbers of people are forced to lead. I shall concentrate on cases where that effort to spread the Christian faith is allied to a commitment to agitate for better political and social conditions.

As an aside, I begin by quoting Will Shoki, editor of the invaluable online opinion journal Africa is a Country. I know I’ve mentioned him at least once in previous weeks, but that is because they are so good. In a piece Shoki wrote for the edition of March 4th this year, he records the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s reference to “the courage of hopelessness”, whereby “it is only when we despair and don’t know anymore what to do that change can be enacted.” Shoki adds: “I have never been quite sure what this means — in fact, I have never been quite sure what Zizek means about anything.” Which is to say, Zizek is a pretty difficult read, but his work is a nut it’s well worth cracking.

Be that as it may. Let us turn again to the question how, in a harsh world largely run by greedy, selfish, murderous brutes, a dedication to the message of the gospels and a commitment to political and social transformation can be a joint life-saver.

Lindsay Brown, the author of the book I’m reviewing, was for many years General Secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES). Towards the end of his book there is an Appendix in which he lists around 150 student organisations worldwide that are affiliated to IFES. Many countries where IFES-allied groups have a strong presence are only nominally Christian, many others (for example, China and the Gulf States) are hostile to the gospel. In Lesotho — where neither of these impediments holds — the relevant body is called the Scripture Union of Lesotho, Tertiary Ministry (SULTM); as Brown’s book doesn’t touch on Lesotho, I’d be very interested to hear from my readers about the activities of SULTM.

The first chapter of Shining Like Stars is titled “Never Underestimate What Students Can Do.” This begins by recounting the story of Daniel and his three fellow captives in Babylon under the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar, the story that ends with three of the young Jews being saved by their faith when they are cast into the burning fiery furnace. Then there are reminders of the long history of evangelism in western Europe, followed by the observation: “world mission is less and less about westerners going elsewhere to serve Christ, but about believers from everywhere going everywhere . . . for example, during the twenty years of civil war in Chad its displaced students, sent by the government to study in other countries, founded IFES movements in Niger, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Burkina Faso.”

One of the first of many testimonies the book contains is, however, from a female British student of Russian, identified simply as Elizabeth, who travelled as an evangelist to one of the -stan countries, former Soviet republics of Central Asia (which of the former -stans this was isn’t specified). It was a perilous but highly successful mission. Elizabeth records: “My birthday was fun. I had five cakes and three parties. They really know how to make cakes here!” Not much peril involved in that, you might say. But then Lindsay Brown notes that many sensitive words in Elizabeth’s testimony have the letter “x” inserted in them and explains that this was to escape electronic surveillance.

And so it seems being an IFES evangelist can be a bit like being James Bond, except more graceful. The second chapter in Brown’s book is titled “Our Sovereign God and Human Courage” and that’s where I’ll pick up the story next week, as well as detailing the activities IFES evangelists organize to attract students to the gospel. And then — after all, the chief focus of this piece — how they strategise evangelical work in relation to the advocacy of political and social transformation.

To be concluded

Chris Dunton

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Insight

Hope springs eternal

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Given the abysmal state of the world today, what is it that keeps one going? I mean, just look at the mess we’re in. The cowardice of world leaders faced with the challenge of climate change —world leaders most of whom are, of course, in thrall to capitalism (for when it comes to our mismanagement, that’s what really rules the roost). The appalling violence in Ukraine and the Middle East. The apparently endless misgovernance of countries as diverse as Lesotho and Nigeria. How does one not give into despair?

Me, I have an interim resource and a vastly more profound one. The former is my commitment to left-wing socialism, a conviction that life on earth can be vastly improved by following the principles of Marxist-Leninism (not — an important qualification — the corrupt form of those principles that moulded dictatorships such as the Soviet Union). The second resource is faith in the message of the Gospels, the embracing of our Lord Jesus Christ. For with this, the ills of the world pale into insignificance. Which is not — I absolutely insist — to refuse the responsibility of political commitment to ease the suffering of millions on earth, a duty we have while we’re still stuck on the bloody place.

Of those two resources, one allows a limited, constrained kind of hope, the other a hope that is boundless.

To expand on the notion of hope, recently in these pages Bishop David Ramela quoted the great Czech author and political leader Vaclav Havel, who became President of his country after resisting Soviet oppression in acts of dissidence for which he was imprisoned. Havel, as quoted by Bishop Ramela, wrote: “I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just carry hope in my heart . . . I am thankful to God for this gift. It is as big as life itself.”

Hope as distinct from optimism? Well, a couple of references here. First, the great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (like Havel, imprisoned for his beliefs, in his case by Mussolini’s Fascists) wrote of the need to maintain “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” In other words, any reasonably intelligent person knows that things are going to screw up, but must act as if this were not the case. And another Marxist, the British critical theorist Terry Eagleton (the mentor of your columnist, incidentally, when he was an undergraduate — and ever since) has written a fine book, Hope Without Optimism. I shan’t go into that here, but shall review it in this column in a few weeks’ time.

Turning to the relationship between political commitment and the Christian faith, the evangelist preacher Robert Sheehan once commented: “Many Christians put more weight on political programmes and economic packages than on the power of the gospel in the nation. Do you?” The answer, I would hope, is “no”, but “quite a lot of weight all the same.” And I’m going to sign off this week with a lengthy quotation from the New Testament—namely, Ephesians 2: 14-22—which has to do with the relationship, in the time of Paul’s evangelism, between Jews and Gentiles. It is a passage — to refer to my piece some weeks ago on the Gaza crisis — that one would like to read to the Hamas leaders in Palestine and to Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu before banging their heads together.

“For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in his flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordnances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace. And that he might reconcile them both to God in one body, through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near. For through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father. Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you are also being built together for a dwelling place in God in the Spirit.”

Joining, harmony, hope.

Chris Dunton

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Insight

Reading and emotion

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What does a good piece of writing do? How does a piece of writing evoke emotions in you? Well, reading is a good art that can stimulate and sharpen our sensibilities. In this instalment we focus on the emotional journey triggered and enabled by good literature. While other books may educate us and sharpen our cognitive abilities, that is the abilities to think and solve problems, reading literature of fiction does more; it stirs our emotions and sharpens our affective capacities.

By affective capabilities, we refer to the abilities to feel and tune in to our emotions and sensibilities. Life, after all, is not only about heart facts and reason. Life is about feeling and experiencing and the ability to put ourselves into other people’s shoes. Reading literature is so liberating and humanistic! Reading art in all its many genres grounds us in the varieties of human experiences and engenders in us tolerance, understanding and empathy.


Stories have a way of taking us on journeys real and imagined which stories transform us from the inside. These stories allow us to visit far-flung places and meet new people and feel their environment. Art has a way of mending bridges because through stories we come to understand people who may seem different from us. And at times we may have felt hatred and dislike for them and their way of doing things. But through reading about them, we hear their stories. We experience that which they are experiencing. We begin to see them from the inside out, and we get to know what lies underneath their skin, so to speak. That’s why they say that we can only begin to make sense of the world once we have reduced the whole world to stories. Let’s write a small story together and ascertain how it would move us. Let’s go.


“He trudged on thinking how he would approach Mwandionesa. Her warm and coy smile flashed before his eye.


Slowly mustering up a morsel of self-belief, Themba trudged along the battered, winding road in the heart of a thicket of musasa trees in the Musirizwi enclaves in Chipinge, south-eastern Zimbabwe. Like a heavy burden, a gnawing sense of failure nibbled at his conscience and a sense of uselessness clung on the air with unrelenting defiance. The stain of failure, the feeling that his people and he were inconsequential had taken lodging in his entire being. That is why he found a sense of solace only from isolating himself in his flimsy cocoon of loneliness like the proverbial ostrich which buried its head in the sand. He would have an occasional home-brewed beer called chikeke and thereafter lock himself within the labyrinth and sordid visceral being.


A gaunt bird flew overhead and he heard its flapping feathers amidst the thickening doom and darkness. “Bird”, he retorted to its presence, “what would you do if you were ever crushed by the label of failure.” A soft, warm tear tricked down the rugged terrain of his face. “Makauyo went to Egoli and returned without a name to himself, Khuyumani, too, lies buried in the bowels of the soil with nothing to show” he said as if he were speaking to the bird.


As he touched the cold handle of the door to his heart clutching a small, whimpering puppy in a cardboard box, he could hear the breathing of Mwandionesa and her stabbing, moist eyes asking him without a word where he has been for the last three days. He stood for a moment which seemed like an eternity. With false bravado, he mustered a not-so-convincing, frail knock. Mwandionesa, heavy with child, slowly made for the door and slid it open. Themba did not know what to do. He loved her but he did not know how to express it, like a person bereft of a language. Mwandionesa rummaged her pots on the dying embers of a hearth and gave him respectfully a plate with sadza and a small portion of chicken. A tear escaped-one, two, and another! She broke down, a downpour of tears streaming down her lips. “Themba, ngendaa yei weidaro mwamuna wangu? Indaa yei ndiripe Dube? Indaa yei weiita mukuba wekunzerereka kungaitei imbudzi irikumakaba isina unousha?” (Themba, why do you treat me in a manner? Why do you behave as if you are a stray goat without a shepherd? If I have wronged you I am prepared to appease you”).


“Look at me, Themba,” she demanded as a visibly pregnant and swollen stomach bulged through her threadbare blouse. The puppy whimpered plaintively. With hesitation Themba went to where Mwandionesa stood. With his furrowed labour-weary hands he touched her waist and led her to their mat of reeds made of “umhlanga” as she was fond of referring to reeds. She did not protest. A glow, a faint glow burnt in her eyes as she eased comfortably on his lanky chest. She fumbled for his hand and shepherded it to the lower regions of her belly and said, “He was kicking all these days you were away.” Themba was engulfed in a flurry of emotions; guilt as well as pride. With deliberateness, Mwandionesa said, “this boy will be called Thando. Yes Thando. He will build this homestead and more should you feel that you don’t have a home.” Themba nodded in agreement.
Themba began to feel the warmth of her presence as her succulent breasts pressed against his lanky chest and slowly closed his eyes…”

What a gripping tapestry which evokes a lot of emotions! It’s a story that stirs a lot of emotions; from empathy, sadness and an inner glow in the heart at the end. As the story begins, we feel Temba’s struggles, fear and hopelessness. He seems to be carrying a huge emotional burden and a crushing sense of defeat. I hope you have also seen Temba’s bid to reassert his sense of being and purpose through his desire of caring for a puppy – we could actually feel it whimpering. And the new hope ignited at the end of the story and affirmations of hope and new beginnings! The birth of a child always brings with it new beginnings – hope springs eternal!
So here we are! Stories are so humanising. Learning to read art in all its genres evokes emotions in us. It sharpens our affective side and warms our hearts.

Vuso Mhlanga teaches at the University of Zimbabwe. For almost a decade and half he taught English language and Literature in English at high school. Send your comments and questions to: mhlangavuso85@gmail.com

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