Let’s keep eyes on the ball

Joram Nyathi Spectrum

Today the dominant narrative is a borrowed one: human rights, democracy (my foot!), freedom of choice, freedom of expression, freedom of sex, freedom of dressing and freedom of association, with whoever, at my convenience

THERE is a glib saying that age is nothing but a number. It needs some interrogation.

This week turned out to be a lot about numbers or, more strictly, about a number, the number 12. This time around, 12 had nothing to do with Jesus’ disciples or the tribes of Israel. It was Zimbabweans expressing horror at the way the courts have trivialised child sex abuse, how stealing a cow earns one a mandatory 10 year jail term while sleeping with a girl as young as 12 years is left at the discretion of the magistrate to decide the punishment, based on “circumstances”. The result was that many offenders were given a few days’ community service as penalty for this life-threatening offence.

There were a lot of hot arguments in both the mainstream and social media, plenty of holy rage against the courts and their magistrates because, so the arguments went, the age of sexual consent for the girl is 16 years. Dr Alex Magaisa exposed this to be a fallacy, demonstrating that the uncontestable lower limit is in fact 12 years in terms of the Constitution. Hon Jessie Majome waded into the debate, stating that she was taking up the issue in Parliament, to raise the number to 18, to be consistent with the voting age in Zimbabwe.

Is that a cure for the ills afflicting our society regarding the girl child; our children as well as how we as adults view and relate to them? Are we the village of yore that worked collectively to bring up a child? Has modernity, town life or so-called civilisation, stolen our children’s age of innocence too early, and with our complicity as parents and adults? What values, principles animate, define us as Zimbabweans, as a nation, to say this is what ubuntu means to us; values or principles which can make one identify a Zimbabwean in London or Paris, beside language?

Like somebody once remarked cynically, when you see a man who has a problem with something suddenly break into a smile, know that he has found someone to blame. In all the heat and hot air about what the correct age of consent should be, our self-righteous fury was directed at magistrates, the courts, the MPs, and ultimately the Constitution. It is not us; it is them. The Constitutional Court is being mooted, being invoked, as the final arbiter, God’s messenger on issues social.

Shame. A Constitution can go only so far as we instruct it. It is a regulatory authority on the contracts we make between ourselves. A Constitution cannot of itself carry greater values, principles or moral sense than we imbue it with. That is why judges are there only to interpret the law, to the best of their ability, closest to what they believe to be our intended wishes in our best interest as society.

You don’t put rubbish in a constitution and expect judges to sanitise it because it is stinking. It is not for the judges to remove clauses supporting homosexuality, pornography, same sex marriages or dual citizenship from a constitution. The disease of child sexual abuse cannot be cured simply by a Constitutional Court ruling either that the legal age of sexual consent for the girl is 18 or 16 or 12.

The disease we suffer from is that we have lost all sense of values and principles which should guide us as a people, who we are, where we want to go and what we want to be. But coloniality has left us exposed. We want to be everything to everybody. Look at how at the age of two years our little girls have human hair and braids of the strangest colours on their heads, just so they reject their Africanness at an early age; witness how at the age of five the same girl performs shocking sexual dances in the streets or on national television.

By the age of 10, the little creature has been sexualised into a pervert, all this while the mother cheers, never mind what the Constitution says about sex and children below 12 years. How do we redeem such a creature by raising the age of consent to 18 or 20 or 25 years?

We have lost all our anchoring values which should regulate, outside the imprimatur of law, how we relate to the girl child as men, how we relate to the boy child as women; what life values and principles we teach to our children besides liberal individualism anchored on the self.

We are far from being a nation, we have moved very far from being a community since the age of colonial enlightenment; we are isolated individuals ready to be blown by alien currents in any direction. Today the dominant narrative is a borrowed one: human rights, democracy (my foot!), freedom of choice, freedom of expression, freedom of sex, freedom of dressing and freedom of association, with whoever, at my convenience. I am no longer my brother’s keeper, let alone his daughter’s keeper.

That is the kind of valueless society we have become, drifting aimlessly, blindly grasping at whatever shines before us every passing day. And we want to pretend that such a disease can be cured by dictates of law. If that were ever possible, we should not have murderers, thieves or rapists, because we know the penalties. The issue is about the values we carry with us, the impulses which motivate us, whether we are in Zimbabwe or the UK or the Netherlands. Who are we, the world’s drifters in the wind!

Two recent incidents should suffice as examples of how we have become a rootless people ready for capture by more degraded, decadent cultures. First, it was the issue of a juvenile who raped a young girl. The law said he could not be imprisoned because of his age. Fair. The magistrate decided he should be caned as punishment for the offence. Surprise. The law said no, he could not be caned because it was degrading and inhuman punishment.

Seeing as he was a juvenile, his transgressions were unpunishable. No one gave me a response when I inquired about justice for the rape victim who had been subjected to an inhuman and degrading attack. That’s our civilised Zimbabwe.

Second was giving condoms to primary school pupils. It was argued that pupils were indulging in adult games at an early age. Surprises of them all; it was proposed that we discipline them by packing condoms in their sachets every morning. That means I should every evening check if my Benny or Betty has used her day’s supplies, so I can replenish if she/he is a diligent worker.

People applauded, the same as they did about people walking about in the streets semi-naked, just as they did recently about a ruling on loitering for prostitution. Now we want to blame the courts and magistrates; we want even to drag into this rotten debate the Constitutional Court so we can blame it for failure to inculcate the correct values in our children as a nation?

The malady is suppurating and spilling on to the streets and we want to blame the magistrates! Enough of this garbage. Let me end with a brief preview of Sandton.

That is the venue of the next AU summit.

Although the theme focuses on women empowerment under Agenda 2063, there is plentiful demanding attention. Most of the issues are fundamental to the meaning of the African Union itself while others relate to its institutional integrity, like funding of its operations and administration by foreigners.

The catalogue includes an African Standby Force, self-funding, security threats posed by the Libyan catastrophe, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Mali, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and, lately, Burundi. These are serious matters which should narrow any petty differences caused by personal egos among African leaders.

It is therefore with great sadness that one reads a statement from the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights urging the AU summit next week to extract a guarantee from South Africa that there will be no recurrence of xenophobia or Afrophobia in that country in future.

These are the kind of distractions that can torpedo efforts being made to achieve greater regional integration, agendas designed to water seeds of disharmony which have dogged Africa since the end of colonial rule. These petty agendas which seek to cloud the bigger picture of getting Africa to speak with one voice, to stand up to bullying by the European Union and America.

Such a demand, if pushed beyond reason, is certain to provoke a strong reaction, one the media would love but Africa would live to regret. In any case, it’s no arcane science that there are forces praying to see the fracturing of the AU or Sadc under President Mugabe’s watch. The South African government has set up institutions and mechanisms to deal with xenophobia.

It would be insulting to ask for guarantees which go beyond reason, like insinuating that the previous outbreak was at the instigation of government. Africa has more than enough challenges without people fomenting further disharmony to keep it divided forever so as to easily to extract its natural resources.