When they came to our village, they were in threadbare clothings and flip-flops like the rest of us. Their hair was quite overgrown and unkempt while their teeth was yellowing as they could not even afford to buy toothpaste. They invited us to a meeting in the village square and coaxed us to join them in their boat.
“If you come with us in the boat; we’ll take you to the land overflowing with milk and honey…….” they pleaded with us.
“For more in your pockets, lower taxes and more jobs…….nipamaka fye!” They shouted their lungs out as they punched their fists into the air.
“Pamaka!” We roared in unison, exuberantly.
Considering the long hours we spent breaking our backs slogging away in the Choncholis’ factories for a pittance; what they were saying to us made a lot of sense, of course. We were particularly enchanted by the leader of the boat although he confessed he had no vision of his own. He struck us as humble and humane. He had no qualms accepting our offers of Kachasu. He’d imbibe generous amounts of the highly potent alcoholic beverage after which he would take to the floor and mesmerize us with his dancing prowess. The women particularly loved him. They’d go ecstatic as he dexterously gyrated his flexible waist.
“We’ll create 1 million jobs for our youth, enhance tenets of democracy and account for every penny we’ll collect from you…” he was literally waffling at this juncture as he tried to maintain his balance. “Don’t be misled by that Kachema from the South; come with us in the boat and you won’t regret.”
Eventually, a judge came to our village bearing a box. He handed us slips of paper with photos of the humble leader and Kachema on them. All we needed to do was tick the box adjacent to the face of one we wanted to be our village headman. We obviously settled for the humble leader! And thus commenced the journey into the wilderness …….the boat would sail haphazardly for the next 7 years without making any meaningful progress. We couldn’t stomach our patience anymore! We started complaining…….in whispers, of course; all of us – the youth, students, women and the aged! The humble leader was livid upon learning that Kachema was bragging that he’d run the village better than him.
“I’ll fall on him like a ton of blocks,” the humble leader warned, sternly.
In the fullness of time, students were stripped off of their meal allowances. Shortly, their bursaries were equally scrapped off. Obviously, the students didn’t take this kindly. They immediately hopped out of the boat and took to the streets to express their displeasure. The humble leader didn’t waste time unleashing the cops on them. They gave chase like a pack of vicious hounds and followed them all the way to the hostels. They smoked them out by lobbing tear gas canisters into their rooms after which they ordered them to drop their trousers or lift up their dresses. Each student was lashed on their bare buttocks 1000 times leaving them scarred! Poor Mapenzi, a devout adherent who endeavoured to steer away from any trouble wasn’t so lucky though. The fumes from the gas severely chocked her and made her suffocate. She was pronounced dead upon arrival at hospital.
In no time, the youth equally joined the frenzy! Fearing for their lives, they took their protest to social media lampooning and denouncing the leaders of the boat, day in and out. Others simply took refugee in the bush and demanded for change. Armed with all manner of weapons – guns, pangas, catapults and knives, the thugs from the boat bayed for their blood! Lawrence, a fearless youth leader of the reds, otherwise popularly known as Gaddafi amongst his peers, was traced to Kaoma and shot dead at point blank by the barber man of the humble leader. Mutapa, another indefatigable youth mobilizer of the reds was trapped by the thugs in Mtendere and bludgeoned to death by hammers and knobkerries!
As the thugs drove back to their hideout at Kamugodi, they spotted an elderly woman clad in a red T/shirt. She had just arrived in the capital from Barotseland. The thugs mistook her for a member of the reds. They descended on her and tore it off exposing her floppy breasts! A scribe from Uncle Fred’s The Past Newspapers witnessed the unfortunate incident and wrote about it. The thugs were obviously unhappy. They went after him and pinned him to the ground. They pried open his mouth using a claw bar and emptied the entire contents of their bowels in him!
When Uncle Fred’s The Past Newspapers still recounted a story about a teenaged girl in Kitwe who had herself baptized with chibuku by the thugs as others stripped off her clothes and played with her genitals for pitching up at a pub in red attire, the humble leader was raving mad! He ordered the tax man to immediately close The Past Newspapers for a bogus case of tax evasion.
With Uncle Fred’s The Past Newspapers no longer poking their nostrils into the affairs of the boat, the humble leader and his thugs went on rampage looting the little the villagers possesed. They awarded themselves massive contracts of building roads, bridges, schools and clinics in the village at inflated prices! Their greed took them as far as printing new Bank notes during the night and sharing them amongst themselves. They transformed into multi-millionaires, instantly! They went into a overdrive amassing assets everywhere as if in a competition – they acquired state of the art SUVs straight from the showroom, built breathtaking mansions in exclusive neighborhoods and established businesses in Dubai, Uganda, Eswatini and other places!
While the majority of villagers remained trapped in absolute poverty, the thugs enjoyed life of opulence. They used $100 bills as toilet paper, flew to Cape Town for their English breakfast, jetted to London for shopping and lunch and stopped over in Paris for dinner before retiring to their mansions in New Kasama.
“If you can’t afford bread and butter, you can still eat sweet potatoes; they’re very nutritious!” they would retort each time they heard us complain.
Meanwhile, the popularity of Kachema who was reputed to own thousands of cows was soaring to the skies! Many people in the village were now looking up to him as the messiah who can easily solve their nightmare! When the humble leader learnt about this from the Shushushis, he wasn’t impressed at all. He had previously tried to break the back of Kachema by condemning him to a congested dungeon for being found on the same road as himself. As a villager who grew up in the village herding cattle, 120 days of confinement into a maximum prison was nothing to Kachema. He came out much stronger than before and breathed hard on the neck of the humble leader.
“We’ve to come up with something to lock him up for good….” the humble leader kept reminding his kandiles.
When the blame for the gutted markets failed to stick on Kachema, they came up with a more sinister plan. Once we retired for the night, the thugs would go around spraying deadly chemicals into our mud huts. This would choke us and force us out of our huts huffing and puffing as we gasped for air. A number of us decided to abandon our huts and opted to endure nights out in the cold with our eyes peeled off.
“This can only be the work of the thugs from the boat…” we confided in ourselves. “There’s no way Kachema and his red team would sink so low.”
Their plan had obviouly backfired on them! As if on cue, the Katolikas finally chipped in. “We are appealing to government to bring this Satanic act to an immediate end!”
Suddenly, the gassing petered out. We could now go about our chores unencumbered and come back home knowing we’d sleep soundly. We vowed to teach the humble leader and his thugs a bitter lesson for traumatizing us, come August.
Unbeknownst to us, the humble leader would still be scheming to send Kachema back to prison so as to keep him out of the race for leadership. Shortly, controversy surrounding some land belonging to the Hatembos reared up its ugly head. Like the serpent in the Bible, lady Edith sweet talked the Hatembos to complain to the cops that Kachema had defrauded them out of their property years back despite forking out a huge amount of money for the same.
This was the golden opportunity the humble leader had been waiting for! Although the investigations revealed that there was impropriety on the part of Kachema, the humble leader determined to send him to prison! However, before Lady Edith working in cahoots with the thugs from the boat would pounce on the Hatembos and compel them to testify against Kachema, they sneaked out under the blanket of darkness and went into hibernation.
Finally, the long awaited month of August came knocking. Fearing reprisals, we devised the watermelon strategy. We pretended to belong to the boat as we quietly vowed to rid ourselves of the monkey on our backs – the humble leader and the thugs! When the judge finally came, all of us ticked the box next to Kachema’s face. The judge tried to rig the numbers but the villagers threatened to burn him alive! August 12 will be remembered as the day our nightmare was resolved!
Prince Bill M Kaping’a
Political/Social Analyst
