By Charles T.M.J. Dube

SOMETIME last year, I wrote about Fluffy, my pet cat, that eventually ran wild after I had taken it into the ceiling where rodents were becoming a menace at my house.
Despite the good vision cats have in darkness, Fluffy saw darkness in the ceiling.
Fluffy saw the darkness and absence of human company as a threat to her livelihood.
She could not read the opportunities that lay around her.
She probably entertained fear of heights and the unfamiliar environment.
We are all subject to such fears and worries at the expense of reading the opportunities around us.
It is true that things are not rosy at the moment in our country, economy wise.
But is it not also true that if we do something about it, our fortunes will change for the better?
And yet, even faced with such circumstances, the good book would still advise: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”
It also goes further and says: “As a man thinks, so is he.”
We are certainly architects and the most critical architects of our fate and circumstances.
The more we despair, the more desperate our situation becomes.
Is it also not true that as we do something about our situation, we will actually be living better and getting ourselves out of our troubles?
I see a lot of rodents in the ceiling, which are good food for the cats among us and it all reduces to what we read out of our situation.
If we read decay, darkness and all the negatives, that is all we will continue to attract for our nation.
If we see light, opportunities and all, that is certainly what we will attract for ourselves.
Our land is currently filled with prophets who preach individual prosperity and invariably linked to the individual prophets’ own individual prosperity.
This has led us to the worship of a deity called ‘Self’.
This god is false and uses false prophets of whom you could also be one.
I have written about some of their false teachings which I have tried to dispute.
They will talk of non-existent tribes in a largely homogeneous Bantu nation.
From my last few contributions you should have drawn that:
l Dialects are only regional in character and do not define our relational norms centred on common historical relationships, ancestry and totems which, with discouragement of marriage in same totem line, unify as opposed to dismembering us.
l People of same totems are found across regions, dialects and languages, even across the popular Ndebele-Shona constructs
l The Mfecane or Tshaka-induced Nguni migrations were not an accident of history and a lot of the people who identify themselves as Shona or Ndebele are actually not what they identify themselves as and have blood relations across that divide, so is it across the dialect-regional divide. To that extent, even by the turn of the century, some people of Nguni extraction found themselves at the centre of Shona religion, such as Chaminuka and Mbuya Nehanda at the turn of the 19th Century.
l Linguists (glottochronologists) estimate that Bantu languages evolved from one language about 2 000 years ago and then to the extent that all of Zimbabwe comprises Bantu languages only, therefore they are a homogeneous people. This is self-evident, especially to some of us who can speak most of these languages and can tell a common culture from which the languages relate.
The elites in both the ruling and opposition parties can easily crowd out the legitimate national agenda/causes by preoccupying our minds and energies on things that are of no value to us, but only further their interests in retaining or getting into power to serve their interests and those of their cronies, even through a game of musical chairs as it were, as they fight over turns to milk the cow.
Our politicians are there to serve us with integrity and they must remain accountable to us at all times.
We must all be our brother’s keeper, even our own keepers, and must not allow mediocrity and/or mismanagement of our affairs to be acceptable as standard.
We probably need to seed for and generate a new variety of prophets, which should include you the reader.
This variety should be talking of prospering others and the self incidentally.
It should be making positive, but not blind affirmations for our country.
We should be talking positive things about our country and only then will positive things come to our country.
There is a way of pointing the negative that is positive, and another that is destructive and leads to despair and hopelessness.
The greedy and corrupt cannot fit in a clean society that looks forward to a thriving hardworking nation for they will find themselves out of place and out of company.
We must also be able to see beyond the darkness in the ceiling as we are not that blind after all and be able to talk about the rodents/opportunities in the ceiling.
We have the natural resources including land, a good climate, educated human resource base, export opportunities and very visible shortages which also need to be serviced.
We have foreign currency shortages meaning an unsatisfied domestic market.
Our problem though is that we have developed parasitic mindsets bent on reaping where we have not sown.
Thus we would rather divert cash to ourselves and our friends to sell, rather than produce goods and services to sell.
True prophets emphasise and warn on the dangers ahead if we do not follow a certain righteous path.
The crux of their sermon though should be on the good things ahead of us.
They should point us to the available opportunities than to minefields, dongas and other negatives.
It is only that way that we will be forced to remove the landmines as we exploit the opportunities.
We are not closing the dongas because we are down in self-pity and despair, pointing fingers and cursing those ‘making it difficult for us’ to prosper.
Negatively stereotyping our country will not take us anywhere as a nation.
Only positive action and talk fills the dongas and takes us forward.
The question though is: What have you really done about your situation and livelihood or are you just another parasite crying foul because you have not been able to lay your sucker on the national blood veins like those you only envy and not condemn deep down in your heart?
It should not be about milking the cow, and turns to do so, but feeding it and letting it reproduce.
And this we should be able to do with integrity, which should now take me back to a continuation of our business and integrity series in the coming articles.