Of awards galore and off side tea boys

Bar Talk with Bra Gee
It looks like Bra Gee and the Regulars have become the only institution not offering awards of one kind or another. We have noted that giving out recognition to sometimes undeserving but always powerful figures has become the latest business.
So after the failure to launch our own religious mega corporate, we will try this route instead. As the year still has a few months to go, we are leery of declaring any outright winners right now, but there are already a few cases that have made us sit up. So sit tight and wait for the special year end edition in which we will bring you the runners up and the winners.

Worst business decision
We do not know the baker behind Sharon Macheso’s confectionery disaster masquerading as a wedding cake, but we definitely know that was a bad business decision.
We can excuse Sharon for her poor taste; look at her parents, then that vulgar nouveau rich paramour that her father had brought into the family, into that mix add her interrupted sojourn in China, the land of loud colours, and you can understand how she would imagine such a cake.

But for a professional to then agree to do it is tantamount to career suicide. So hideous was the cake that for once on Facebook everyone agreed with those who posted nasty comments about it. Not even a single person could bring themselves to type something positive about the sugary bomb.

We will not go into the rest of it on bridesmaids whose dresses were allegedly made by a tailor who specialises in bedspreads or the unsightly bridal armpits which were obviously missed during the skin-lightening orgy, but just stick with the awful cake.

Any real baker asked to produce that hideous pile should have refused outright. If it was up to us we would have advised the client on how to keep the idea but in a more eye-friendly manner. And if Sharon had said it had to be her way or no way, then we would definitely take the second option without blinking. Or if we were really in need of the lolly from the contract we would make the client sign a confidentiality clause barring her from ever associating our bakery with that scary thing.

Tea boy gaff
We have nothing against tea boys who have pulled themselves up by their boot straps and have become movers and shakers in our world.
In fact, we admire their strength of character and refuse to join the malicious denigration of such people. So it is not these former tea boys that we have serious beef with, but the one who says that garden boys were better off than modern day workers because they could send their kids to boarding schools.

We are not economists and we have never claimed to have any string of letters after our names, but we can smell the stuff that comes out the wrong end of the bull. First of all Mr Tea Boy, we urge you to go back to the lives of those gardeners and compare them to that of the modern day worker in Zimbabwe and you will find why they could send kids to boarding school.

Those gardeners and maids did not have WhatsApp on their smart phones to enrich the mobile operators with millions each day.
Neither did they have a fast food outlet in their face whichever way they faced. They did not pay ransoms to prophets each week as offerings in order to earn the right to receive holy oil.

They had no cheap Chinese goods to buy everyday to replace the ones that they would have bought yesterday which will no longer be useful. They were content to wear their single muvharadhongi outfits every weekend and did not insist on owning suitcases of multi-coloured junk that now pass for de rigueur fashion trends.
They did not have to fuel, license, repair and maintain cheap ex-Japs all the time.

They did not have to pay bills for DStv, clothing accounts, expensive hairdos and all the other costs of keeping up with the Moyos. Expensive cuisine meant splurging out on rice and chicken, bread and jam as well as sweets once a year at Christmas time, not going to some cordon bleu restaurant every other day.

Their idea of a holiday was an intense session in the fields in the rural areas, not hopping on a flight to some world resort.
Even the regular places were fewer and most people only went there at weekends instead of expecting a carnival 24/7 for 365 days in a year.

And those kids in boarding schools were content to eat burnt sugarless porridge in the morning, sadza and boiled cabbage for lunch and sadza and boiled beans for supper with meat coming on Sunday. The kids did not demand smart phones, fancy hairstyles, Cerevita and Oreos as well as the premium DStv bouquet. Try going back in time and fitting all those wants on that gardener’s pittance and we assure you that you will not go far. Now do you understand why today’s workers cannot make ends meet? It’s simply because there are more ends to join, Mr Tea Boy!

We said it
We have always loved, believed in and ardently supported the theory of the existence of some carefully obscure conspirators who really run the world, not the pretenders like the Obamas and the Camerons. Of course we are not talking about the puerile utterances from the hordes of ignoramuses who discovered the word Illuminatti recently, but real issues.

Like why has no one ever been able to satisfactorily explain how if HIV was not manufactured in an American laboratory patient zero was in that country and how AIDS ravaged Key West before a single central African village even knew of the slimming illness? Why did HIV move from towns — read foreigner infested areas, to the rural areas in Africa instead of the other way round, if it had jumped from the monkey to us, the monkey’s first cousin?

Now with Ebola, there is no doubt that this is our own and the world is rushing to make sure that it only kills us and no one else. If HIV was ours the continent would have been quarantined and maybe even bombed out of existence, ‘in the interest of saving humanity’ of course. Remember those evil nuns who were conveniently whisked home after being convicted of the murder of babies? Would they have received the same treatment if they were even suspected of killing American instead of mere African children?

Some patriotism please
The sight of yet more containers filled with olive oil left us feeling rather upset. Not because we wished we had been there to receive the grease that would lubricate away all our rags. But because after the announcement of our determination to find out the provenance of the miracle oil, the good man was good enough to tell everyone that this was ordinary olive oil. Now that we know, we do not care if it works or not.

After all, in our book anyone who stops taking ARVs to put their faith in a miniscule bottle of olive oil deserves to push up the daisies.
But what irks us is why these self-styled prophets must go and import olive oil by the barrel instead of simply putting their miracles in soya, cotton or maize oil which is produced right here at home so that they can bless local industries to ensure that their oft promised abundances do happen to someone at least?

Till next week, bottoms up!

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