The Chinese Revolution under Zimbabwean skies
By Tongai Phillip Mukarati
Recent media reports and exposés of abuses have shown us there is definitely something rotten in the State of Zimbabwe.
Our mineral resources are being depleted, our human resource base is being abused with impunity, all this whilst our government watches without tangible action to write home about.
Whilst gold, platinum lithium, and chrome among other mineral continue to have considerable demand globally, and Zimbabwe extracting tonnes of them per year, the opposing story of perpetual poverty is heartbreaking for the conscious Zimbabwean.
How the Chinese with the acquisance of a local chief can get away with paying only $6500 for a Zimbabwean life shows how little we now think of ourselves.
How workers at Chinese run Zimbabwean mines are abused, overworked, physically beaten up, and shot, are all indications that the proverbial drum is now beating too loud, and that the Chinese are now taking too much for the owner to notice.
What is perhaps more alarming is that our government seems to be watching all this playing out without actively doing much to stop the shameful acts and yet claim to be a government of the people of Zimbabwe before the Chinese.
What is the sentence for drug use, possession, and peddling in China? Worse still should the offender be a foreigner!? Yet we all know what happened to the Chinese national caught with dangerous drugs in Newlands, Harare.
What is the sentence for murdering or even slapping a citizen in China? I wonder how many Zimbabweans would survive long after assaulting a Chinese national – l mean we do not have to go very far, let’s look at how Zimbabweans and other foreigners are being treated right next door in South Africa. That alone tells you what should or can happen.
What are our regulatory bodies doing about these flagrant abuses? Do we still have a Zimbabwe Republic Police that works beyond roadblocks? Or a Ministry of Labour overseeing labour relations?
Or are these Chinese nationals as George Orwell would put it, ‘more equal and protected than Zimbabweans?’
Surely we can do way better than this. Our Zimbabwean lives are of paramount importance especially within the borders of Zimbabwe.
