| Water and the Kids |
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The sign on this picture reads LOBENBULA YOUTH CENTER. Its Tuesday the 2nd of October 2007 at 11.00am The youths and kids you see on the picture should be in three places at this hour. The youths should be inside this lovely Youth Center developing their life skills, The elder kids should be at school studying, and the little ones should be at Pre-school.
(click for larger image)
But because Zimbabwe is now a failed state, these kids are fetching water to be used at home for the day at this hour. They have been on the water queue since 06.30am The teachers are on strike and the youth center has become a white elephant with no resources to function and run useful life skills programs for the youths. The elder youth will charge Z$20.000 for standing in the queue and pushing the water to the homes of the owners of the containers in the wheelbarrows.
Why not, after all he hired the wheelbarrows, paid the guys managing the water queue to fill more than one container and spent valuable time on the queue. After this delivery they will go back to the queue and start all over again. The little kid at the back carrying the bottle on his chest will give it to his grandmother when he gets home so that she can cook porridge for him and others, that is if granny will be able to get a plate of meal-meal from a friend who they go to church together in Gwabalanda township where she went early in the morning to borrow some.
This is now the life for thousands of kids and youths in the second largest city in Zimbabwe, Bulawayo these days. Wasting their childhood and youth days paying for the incompetence of very selfish exited policy makers, who are exited just by sitting in offices and buildings that where built by white settlers and calling themselves Politicians most of whom are using state resources to spend each day at the office celebrating that they are not one of those that died during the liberation struggle.
These are difficult conditions that the kids and youths find themselves living in today. Are the children of our cabinet ministers and members of parliament both ruling and opposition parties living under similar conditions as well? No! How about the children of leaders of Civic Society Organizations and NGOs who earn their salaries from Donors in hard currency? No!
When I call for change, it is such conditions that I refer to and these conditions can be changed by those that are elected to public offices. It is their responsibility that they cannot and should not shift to anyone else. It is these conditions that as artists we record creatively and call for policy makers to address as a matter of urgency. If they fail to cause change to such conditions we then call to those that are registered to vote not to reelect back to office people who specialize in sloganeering and not service delivery that improves the daily lives of ordinary people. This is because it is not my responsibility to change elected leaders but the responsibility of the electorate. It is how ever my full responsibility to point out to those elected and the electorate of such conditions should I come across them. The kids in this picture are not carrying bottles of slogans but bottles of water. That is the product that they need, at home not slogans. They don’t need it next year but today, now.
To the World Bank and IMF look at what you have achieved with your program of corrupting our African leaders by throwing money at them in the absence of any national laws that hold them accountable to the citizens for the money they borrow from your institutions on behalf of these kids pushing the wheelbarrows. When you have totally corrupted them you turn against them calling them bad corrupt detectors who staff money in your overseas banks while the populations of Africa suffer in poverty! Get real old boys! This can’t go on.
To you Zimbabweans, we need to redefine the meaning of Politics in Zimbabwe as a matter of urgency. In my opinion what is currently going on does not qualify for Politics.
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