Magreth Nunuhe IT’S election year and I just love the spirit of going back to the drawing board to see where we did well or where we flopped. As much as we feel hopeless at times when we see others are chopping the life nicely, some of us are secretly wishing that a dust cloud of Alzheimer could blow over the Ministry of Finance, furniture shops, clothing outlets, supermarkets, cash loans, jewellery stores, the footing “I Am Selling” Zim ladies and the Palestinian “Mirrors and Curtains” brothers so that they can forget what we owe them. There are so many evil kredit forces at work that if you don’t pay up, you could find SMS messages like “May God be with you, but remember that he who laughs last, laughs best.” There are unconfirmed reports of Namibians who kama took their salary bonuses and life savings to follow some celebrated priests to Naija but came back half sewe – locked up in bird cages. Titse, the minds of the innocent hard-working populace are imprisoned from all angles. These days you can’t even trust the banks with their skelm hidden costs. Every time you make a transaction, a dollar leaves your pocket. You deposit money, you pay; you withdraw money, you pay; you enquire how much money you have, you pay. It’s like any time you sneeze the word “bank”, you lose. I mean, why do you think the Chinaman hates the banks with a passion and would rather ‘invest’ his money under the mattress or between beer crates? I don’t say it’s a good thing, because they have regretfully become victims of syndicates who rob and kill them. But tjiri tjiri, we live in trying times. I hear these days times are so hard that the aoties have become stingy and “wise” not to pay for Brazilian hair anymore. They kama make sure the chica they have vested interest in already has an old pair of Brazilian hair that would perhaps only need “servicing”. Otherwise, they would kastig rather go for bald-headed ladies, because all they need to do in order to maintain her look is to buy her a shoe brush. Ondasa (I’m dead). Things are not easy – even for our politicians. That’s why I was surprised when I saw the young and trendy DTA president coming out of a shack where he had been apparently spending his nights for three days. At first glance I thought, maybe the infamous 411s have swindled him out of his house or some ATM spinners got hold of his bank pin number and cleaned him out. But realising it’s an election year, by and large, there’s nothing unusual about this. I am sure that like many of us, he came from humble beginnings, growing up in the village where he had to rear cattle, sleep in a house made of manure with no electricity and where the closest water place could be a kilometre away. But some people are reacting as though Barack Obama decided to come try out Ombili hospitality. I hope that he was well protected because heish, while you may think the ncinas don’t care about what’s going on, they have probably already been plotting how to cut that corrugated zink house open. Even the Madams, who know how to ‘zula to survive’, were probably plotting how to get him out of that shack for a ‘night of fun and pleasure.’ I hope other politicians will follow suit and make their campaigns unforgettable as well. I want to see them jumping off a moving taxi to survive being robbed; climbing over fences to dodge tsotsis, fasting involuntarily for a month, living in a house with a leaking rooftop or staying in a house surrounded by noisy shebeens. That’s the reality we live in that we want them to experience, so that they could hopefully speed up development programmes for our most vulnerable and poor. Sorry Ngo! • This is a repeat as the writer is out of town, bundu-bashing.