We’ll always be held to an impossible standard

AT a time when neighbouring Mozambique was in the throes of armed hostilities between Frelimo and Renamo insurgents (it must have been some time in the early 80s), we once had the privilege of sheltering a preacher who had fled his rural home near the border with the then-beleaguered country to settle in Bishop Lazi’s village.

He told village elders incredible sob tales of how his family was heinously executed by armed men.

He said he only missed an appointment with death by God’s grace, as he was praying in the mountain when the blood-thirsty gun-toting men laid siege on his home and summarily annihilated his loved ones.

He only managed to escape with his life and Bible.

Fate, however, led him to Bishop Lazi’s village to minister the gospel.

No sooner had he been given a piece of land to settle and some provisions to get his life back on track than he formed a small church.

Ironically, from that day onwards, weekends, which ordinarily afforded some time to rest, became hell, as we used to be frogmarched to church by elders who were over-eager to set us on the straight and narrow path to righteousness.

What made it even worse was this tall, dark and wire-thin new evangelist’s fetish for the gospel of doom and gloom.

His fiery sermons and verses, which were usually punctuated by discordant hymns pitched by an irritatingly gravelly voice, were almost always about sin and hell.

As young boys, we were told that if we so much as looked at girls, we would have sinned, and this meant we would be condemned to hell, which we imagined to be a place where the devil used a pitchfork to roast and incinerate sinners in an unimaginably hot bonfire for eternity.

Stealing — which, in our context, meant occasionally raiding the granary without permission for some nuts to snack on while herding cattle — was also a condemnable sin that deserved the burning fires of hell.

The list of sins and transgressions, as outlined by this sanctimonious preacher, was just soul-sappingly long and inexhaustible.

In short, we were bona fide candidates for hell. Kikiki.

And, if the real test of a true man of God was one’s ability to dance for the Lord, then this man was the chosen one.

In-between his day-long sermons, he would indefatigably dance to the same discordant hymns until he was drenched in sweat.

Bishop Lazi would think this is what the Bible meant in 2 Samuel 6:14, when it says: “David was dancing before the Lord with all his might.”

But even after all the prayers, exorcisms and frightening sermons about hell, the sun did not shine any different in the village — Cases of theft actually increased and village damsels continued to be impregnated by unknown men, among some of the notable growing village vices.

As is always the case, the mystery eventually unravelled one night when our preacher fell and drowned in a village well.

At his funeral wake, rumours swirled that he had staggered into the hole while on his way back from one of his hitherto unknown binge-drinking routines.

This was quickly dismissed by brainwashed villagers who did not want to believe this to be true.

When the police were notified of his death, they actually discovered, after some checks, that our beloved pastor was not really a man of God, but a long-sought criminal, who had been on the run.

And when the police details searched his home, some villagers recovered some of the property — a spoon here and a blanket there — they had previously reported as stolen.

The real drama, however, unfolded on the day he was buried.

As his makeshift coffin was being lowered, some of the women and village spinsters wailed uncontrollably, while the bartender from the nearby bottle store was inconsolable.

Village elders naturally wanted to understand what was happening.

Well, it turned out that, while this chap was preaching about virtue during the day, at night, he was actually a sex pest who was having his way with village spinsters, siring a few village bastards in the process.

On the other hand, the bartender’s heartache was quite understandable.

Apparently, our dear pastor left behind a huge bill for unpaid liquor.

It was a mess!

Hypocrites

Matthew 7:15 warns us: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”

2 Corinthians 11:13-15 adds: “For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.”

As a society, we have become used to these kinds of hypocrites, who always tell us to do as they say but not as they do.

During colonialism, they left us holding the Bible while they looted our land, artefacts and minerals.

This sanctimonious lot will always take us as a lesser species that desperately needs to be enlightened and civilised.

Bishop Lazarus was left slack-jawed by the reaction from the United Kingdom establishment after Zimbabwe gazetted the long overdue Criminal Law Codification and Reform Amendment Act, 2023 — which many have been referring to as the Patriot Act — on July 14 to punish those who “wilfully” injure “the sovereignty and national interest of Zimbabwe”.

Judging by the reaction from the West, you would think there is something that is peculiar or patently untoward in the new law, whose primary motivation is to deter Zimbabweans from allying with hostile foreign governments to block investments or economic activity that could be either “beneficial to the people of Zimbabwe as a whole” or “potentially may make a substantial contribution to their economic development”.

It also spells out punitive measures for those agitating for a “military or other armed intervention in Zimbabwe by the foreign government concerned or another foreign government”, including criminalising participating in meetings to plan the “implementation or enlargement of sanctions or a trade boycott against Zimbabwe . . . whose effects indiscriminately affect the people of Zimbabwe as a whole”.

Notwithstanding the fact that we have inherent checks and balances — from Cabinet (Executive), Parliament and the Judiciary — to assess the legality of our laws, the new Act is typically in keeping with the tenets of justice, as it still places the burden of proof on the prosecutor to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the alleged offender indeed acted to wilfully injure the sovereignty and national interest of Zimbabwe.

But there is a context to all this.

Zimbabwe has had the dubious distinction of living through the horror of sanctions that were actively agitated and even crafted by its own citizens.

We now know that the United States’ Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA) — whose pervasive and deleterious impact ultimately led to the collapse of our local currency and still militates against our best efforts to optimally grow our economy — was drafted by some lawyers in the opposition.

We also now know, thanks to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, that there is an opposition leader who actually urged the US, through its ambassador in Zimbabwe, to militarily intervene in Zimbabwe and sanction the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe.

And we also now know that on May 21, 2020, when Zimbabwe was facing an existential threat from the coronavirus pandemic, a senior figure in the opposition actually wrote to the World Bank Group president, David Malpass, to block the institution from extending a planned US$7 million kitty to help Government stop the spread of the virus.

With citizens like these, who needs enemies?

Yet all these people walk scot free despite the damage wrought by their actions.

But, even as the UK Embassy in Zimbabwe was criticising the “Patriot Act”, they forget to mention that three days earlier, on July 11, His Majesty’s government, which is not under siege as Zimbabwe is, had enacted a similar — if not more aggressive — law: the National Security Act 2023 (formerly known as the Counter State Threats Bill).

While its primary motivation is protecting the UK’s economic interests, the new law curiously introduces “new tools of last resort to manage those who pose a threat, but have not met the threshold for prosecution”.

Interestingly, no one knows which “tools” and how those who pose the threat will be “managed”.

In simple English, it means even in cases where UK authorities cannot prove their case beyond reasonable doubt — the gold standard needed to make a case prosecutable — they are now empowered by the law to still take measures to blunt the potential threat.

In essence, it is now to the discretion of the Home Secretary (the equivalent of a minister) to impose targeted restrictions to prevent the most serious forms of harm, particularly in cases where intelligence exists to confirm highly damaging threat activity is planned or being undertaken, but prosecution is not realistic.

Well, unlike the benign provisions of our own Criminal Law Codification and Reform Amendment Act, 2023, the UK’s National Security Act unleashes the spooks, the MI5 in particular, on the UK citizens to deal with cases of potential harm that “take place in the shadows”.

It is the same way the US used its own version of the Patriot Act after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to authorise foreign and domestic phone, wire and computer tapping through the Stellar Wind surveillance programme.

In other words, it allowed the American government to spy on its own civilians.

Imagine the furore that would have resulted had Zimbabwe included the same provision — to allow our capable men and women in the shadows to do the same — in its own law.

To be fair, in its largely muted objections, the British press, which has an admirable virtue of following the flag, has red-flagged how the law could be weaponised to punish reporters and whistleblowers for revealing information that “may materially assist a foreign intelligence service”.

Yet it is Zimbabwe that stands in the dock.

So, how is Zimbabwe’s law unjust if the UK law is just?

Hypocrites!

What is further nauseating is how the same people, who egregiously violated our rights and dignity for centuries, want to preach and pontificate to us about the sanctity of the same values.

Our laws, as in any other jurisdiction, reflect our values and circumstances, and we have more than the capability, capacity and wisdom to craft laws that are compatible anywhere in the world.

You might be interested to know that, for instance, while our Constitutional Court ruled to raise the age of sexual consent to 18 from 16 on May 22 last year, Japan — a member of the Group of 7 powerful nations — only revised its own century-old law on June 14 this year to raise the age of consent to 16 from 13.

This, of course, does not show that our laws are better, rather, it highlights the peculiarities of norms, values and laws in different jurisdictions. The Bishop, however, thinks that, as Zimbabweans, ever since we crossed the sword with our erstwhile colonisers by taking back our land, we will always be held to a different and impossible standard.

So, even if we hold incident-free elections next month, as we will do, the bar will always be sky-high.

But this will not stop us from determinedly marching ahead. We will not be cowed into abandoning doing that which we think is best for our country and people.

Bishop out!