Don’t let the facts spoil a good story
Nice one. ‘Photoshopped’ image from Bambazonkie. Correspondent Sean warns travelers on the Masvingo-Beitbridge highway. “There are unexpected and very deep potholes along the way and right in line of your wheels, especially on the driver’s side and some are unavoidable.”
The road is appalling from Chivhu to Masvingo too, says Sean. Drivers should replace worn of soft shock absorbers where necessary and proceed with caution and watch their speed or the journey “can end up in a terrible disaster.”
Cars with small tyres and top heavy vehicles like the Toyota Venture station wagon are especially at risk. Driving back from Masvingo in his own Toyota Nadia, Sean saw just how bad road conditions are now.
“My rear shocks are on the way out and my vehicle bottomed out a number of times” over uneven stretches along the way, he writes.
Ok, then. Here, from an earlier post – ‘Then and now, the same questions’ – is the giraffe story again:
From ANDREW SAXON, HORIZON MAGAZINE, in March 1999. Nothing has changed except it’s got progressively worse everywhere. And in the cities, dogs must be vaccinated against rabies now, once a problem only in distant areas.
” My friend is driving along the road when she sees a pair of eyes poking out of a pothole a little way ahead. Poor creature has got stuck in there …
My friend stops to help the animal. Is it a dog? Is it a little, furry beastie that may have fled the squatters living in the long grass who chased it for their cooking pot? Is it a rabbit? No, good gracious, it is a giraffe!
If I am not careful I will be accused of distorting the facts. ‘Pasi ne gutter press.’ But quite frankly, nothing would surprise me anymore. One fellow I know says we haven’t had as much rain since 1918, when horse-drawn carts got bogged down and broke their axles in potholes the size of bathtubs.
As we approach the end of the millenium, however, one would have thought we could have coped better with adversity. Harare’s sewers are blocked and bursting and we’ve had cholera reported as close a Mount Pleasant – a bacteria-infested spit away from the hideous, extravagant mayoral mansion being built in Gunhill – and spilled garbage festers everywhere.
Our currency is in crisis, plummeting by the day. But Leonard Tsumba and the wise men at the Reserve Bank say everything is going to be alright in the end. The banks have agreed to peg the Zim dollar against the U.S. dollar by a process called “moral suasion,” an old Bank of England phrase for a gentleman’s agreement rather than legislation.
How sensible of Mr Tsumba to reach consensus with the banks, but everyone knows gentlemen in banks are few and far between.
We are told by the state media that our hard currency reserves and our “import cover” are getting perilously low. Let’s hope Mr Tsumba can pull a rabbit – no, that giraffe is what we need – out of his hat.”
