Muckraker is thrilled the SADC standby army will soon hit our shores. But her excitement has nothing to do with the prospects of those foreign soldiers spanking our mischievous soldiers when they get up to their usual monkey shines.
Muckraker has never believed in outsourcing solutions to the shenanigans in our barracks.

She is not persuaded that yanking a few rotten apples from the ranks and tinkering with regulations will solve our problems.
So forget what our government and SADC say is the mandate of the standby army. They are missing the real point of those foreign soldiers.
There are two reasons why we urgently need those soldiers here. And they are not security and stability. No!

The first is to populate our country. Frankly, that is no job for a miserly 300 or so soldiers SADC countries are offering us.
We need at least 30 000 to be stationed here for at least five years. Yeh, I said it. Half a decade with foreign soldiers.
The recent census proves beyond any grain of doubt that our population is not growing fast enough.

That’s probably means more people are dying than what we are producing, the women have become stingy with their wombs or our men have abdicated their Maker’s duty to populate this little territory.  It is embarrassing that there are more goats than people in this country. It is time we seek foreign intervention.
There is no better way to do that than using soldiers paid by SADC to allegedly protect us. There is nothing sinister with being creative with borrowed things.

Imagine if a neighbour lends you a bulldog to guard your house and you discover that the dog has other talents like making cute puppies. The neighbour would not begrudge you for buying a female dog.

The second and perhaps the most important reason to have the foreign soldiers here is genetic engineering. You can call it genetic intervention if you like but the point remains the same. For years we have been marrying amongst ourselves, hoping to keep our breed pure.

We have been marrying cousins and nephews. With time the gene bank has shrunk.
That policy, if we may call it that, has been ruinous. Because we are fishing from the same pool we are producing a breed that thinks and behaves alike.

Worse, we are making children who will think and act like us. Little wonder our economy is not growing. Thabo starts a carwash and everyone in the country thinks it’s the only brilliant idea around.  Soon you have twenty struggling carwashes in one village and the owners will be wondering why business is terrible. It’s the same with the taxi and chisanyama businesses.

A country whose citizens think alike is destined for doom. We have a generation predisposed to being polarised.
We are a garrulous bunch that never gets anything done because it is committed to fighting useless battles. Groupthink is the bane of our country.
We are so fixated on uniform thinking that we have come to believe those who hold contradictory ideas and views are enemies. That is why propaganda has never been difficult to spread in Lesotho.

We are pliable to even the most idiotic of ideas. You see this in the calibre of debate on our grossly incompetent radio stations.
An inept presenter poops something outrageous and a battalion of listeners, in a zombie-like stupor, jostle to support it.
Rarely do we hear someone berating the presenter for being an unmitigated nincompoop.

It’s there in politics too. We are said to have been divided between two main ideologies: nationalist and congress.
Being literally one person we force our political choices to fit into these manufactured groupings. Beyond being a nationalist or congress there is nothing else we can be.

There are those who might fret about the stature of the offsprings we will be getting from the SADC soldiers but that fear is overdone.
Indeed there is no harm in having taller offsprings. Science has proven that shorter people, especially men, have an inferiority complex (Muckraker just conjured that from her experience with men bereft of metres). It could be one of the reasons why men in this country like brawling over nothing.
Our men are forever on the lookout for people they suspect of disrespecting them.

Add a little height to this generation and we might just have less quarrelling about mundane issues on the streets.
Of course there is a chance that the children from the SADC men and women will be a little darker but that’s a small price to pay for free genetic engineering.

In any case, there is no scientific benefit to having lighter pigmentation. Muckraker has heard this nonsensical refrain that Basotho women are beautiful.
Phew! Yeah right, many are dull though. Beautiful but slow. As Trump, yes that dimwit, says: nice tits, no brains.
Muckraker is not saying our women are generally dull. It’s just that this beauty thing is so overrated that you would think it contributes to the GDP.

We will be daft to deny that we don’t need to expand our gene pool, especially given our pathetic state. We are forever looking for outside mediators.
It is almost impossible to deal with our problems because we are related somewhere somehow. You walk into a High Court to find your distant cousins perched on the judge’s chair.

Thieves are being investigated by cousins and nephews. Uncles are being forced to convict their nephews.
Dig deeper into your history and you will discover that you share some genes with someone you are probably ill-treating.
That is why in times of disagreement we don’t have faith in our own mediators. There is therefore nothing scandalous with asking some foreigners from nearby countries to intervene in the making of future generations.

The SADC soldiers are what we have always wanted for this purpose because their intervention does not come at a cost. We don’t like to pay for things here.  Being on an international mission, there is no way they will demand to remain in this country forever on account that they have planted their seeds here.

So how do we make sure they don’t demand paternity and maternity rights when their mission is over? Well, that is a matter for another day.
Children born by a foreign fathers or mothers are ours. After the mission those who would have participated in the genetic engineering project will get a gratuity.
But if they insist on taking their children then we will expose them for moonlighting while on international duty.
We will tell the world that instead of helping to create a conducive atmosphere for reforms they were busy interfering with our demographic matters.
If that doesn’t work we will manufacture bigger lies about them. That is how we do things here: we lie big. Let the hunt for SADC babies begin.

On an entirely different matter, Muckraker is stunned by the thuggish treatment of MoAfrika boss Ratabane Ramainoane.
It is true that MoAfrika is a loose cannon and Ramainoane is an unmitigated blabbermouth.
Yet that does not justify silencing the radio station and arresting its owner like a rat.

It was surreal to watch a whole battalion of police officers dragging a bony and defenceless man like an animal.
The show of force we witnessed last Friday cannot be justified.
There is no evidence that he was armed.

So why the brute force? Well, it’s not hard to decipher. This is how our police behaves when they go for small men suspected of small crimes. Real criminals are laughing at the pictures of Ramainoane’s arrest and wondering what our police are inhaling.