Of chicken heads, Petraeus, PM

piece of meat of choice first, followed by the second eldest and youngest last.
That sealed my fate with the chicken head.
Repeated appeals to my parents to at times either order a variation of the picking order or the pieces of chicken destined for the boys’ common plate — so I could avoid the chicken head on some occasions — were bluntly rejected.
A sympathetic friend at school one day came up with what sounded a clever idea: “Tell your parents you had become allergic to the chicken head and show them some blisters on the hand as evidence of this!”
Still, I drew an unsympathetic, emphatic no.
But my father bothered to give his reasons for turning down my plea, even on the “convincing” medical grounds I had given.
“You cannot be allergic to the chicken head and not the soup, drumsticks or wings of the same chicken, cooked in the same pot, at the same time. Impossible,” he declared, dictatorially.
Everyone in the Movement for Democratic Change formations, especially the parties’ leadership, will tell you “restoring” democracy, government accountability and freedom of all shades as practised in the West, is their number one goal.
Zanu-PF has “eroded” all this and this explains the troubled political and economic circumstances the country finds itself in, they will argue, spiritedly.
But they will certainly not point out that the “eroded” values they are prepared to shed their followers’ blood to “restore” were brought by Zanu-PF in the first place, and through the barrel of the gun from the same “democratic” West.
In true “democratic” and “government accountability” fashion, David Petraeus, the spymaster of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, resigned two weeks ago after admitting to an extra-marital affair.
He felt he could not continue holding on to the high public office after betraying the trust of his wife, and possibly that of his country.
Investigations, including by the CIA, are continuing into possible damaging security leaks from the affair. 
Yet Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, like me with the chicken head in my boyhood days, has feigned some allergy to some tenets of Western democracy as demonstrated by Petraeus.
The premier is caught up in a much more wicked sex scandal than the four-star American general, yet he has selectively chosen not to step into Petraeus’ “democratic” footsteps by standing aside also.
In Petraeus’ case, unlike the premier’s, far fewer hearts were broken and certainly no innocent child had to petition the courts for a birth certificate.
But in the Prime Minister’s, the heartbreak extends even to a chief in whose lands a very serious abomination was committed when the premier “married” in a forbidden month.
“You cannot be allergic to the chicken head, and not the soup, drumsticks or wings of the same chicken, cooked in the same pot, at the same time. Impossible.” — New Ziana.