The Sunday News
We wakeup everyday to newly coined trending hashtags, which are sexist and are obviously absorbed normal because it’s women who have created them.
Our society has chosen to turn a blind eye to reality as it pounds everyday that gender mainstreaming is creating a new hierarchy, a system that is quickly oppressing men, a mechanism which is totally avoiding equality and equity but successfully condoning what I call sexual hypocrisy. The society we live in today is choosing to turn a cataract ogle to a looming predicament which insults men and finds it ok, ignores that women are human more than they are women hence their impurity is just like those of trashy men. I say this knowingly that rehearsed feminists will call me sexist and insensitive but they have to know the truth, some societal problems are generation specific and when you try to force that historic narrative on the young generation, you are recreating the same problem, however, with a new balance.
My analysis this week will focus on a woman who proves that lumping people or painting them with the same brush is not just and sensible. It defies any empirical logic, otherwise streetwise or philosophical. If society concludes that all men are trash because case studies of trash men have proven so, then case studies of some women should justify the same insult. Not all women are angels like our mothers, they are worse off than the trash men we grieve about daily. This however, is not justification enough to hate and insult our mothers just because some women are bad elements in society, however, “powerful” they have become. When they deceive those who have given them power, we don’t lash out at all women; we meekly call them out as rogue citizens in parliament. We say to them “guqula izenzo” like the slogan they have been chanting for 17 years surely testifying that they have changed their act from being honest democrats to being either thieves, gangsters, bandits or bourgeoisie in their sniffed comfort of power.
Dorcas oh! Dorcas
One is in the frame of a beautiful but scandalous Dorcas Sibanda, the National House of Assembly representative of Bulawayo Central, a single mother, a businesswoman who has been in Parliament for almost 10 years. She is the serendipitous anecdotal irony of the virtues of “omama bakaDokha” (SDA women of the order of St Dorcas). Unequivocally, she is nowhere close to a replica of virtuous women from SDA yet her name bears the guidance which binds these women. Many of you would testify that our mothers usually clad in green and white are an emblem of love, care, honesty and selflessness. I remember the days when HIV/Aids was the biggest employer in Zimbabwe, the home-based care givers were mostly those women-“omama bakaDokha”. Despite such a beatified meaning enclosed and weighing in that name, our Dorcas seems to have a penchant for media attention, albeit for dramatic reasons. Reasons alienating her from the fondness associated with motherhood, all reasons despising our collective belief that women leaders have a feminine flair absent in our aggressively patriarchal politics.
She is a more bad macho man herself. More banditry than most gangster politicians I know.
Suffer Suffer Suffer for what? na yo fault be dat . . .
Just last week she was refusing to pay a suffering and scrounging hairdresser her paltry $25 after a sterling job on her daughter. Such a stunt of inviting police to the scene who later discovered that she was wrong are nothing else than a remarkable display of dishonesty by a mother who is ungrateful on Mothers’ Day. Not only does she refuse to pay but claims that her daughter had been unlawfully detained. How on earth does such a woman continue going back to Parliament unchecked? Firstly, she is the one who dropped her daughter at the hairdresser promising to come and pick her up and pay yet she expects that the “suffering” ought to irresponsibly release the daughter of her client without her consent. This is a daughter I am talking about; you don’t just release someone’s daughter yet the parent showed you how concerned she is about her daughter’s whereabouts and company by driving her to you specifically. Secondly, she had breached an agreement of pay as you go, contrary to an agreed minute-long mobile transfer she had promised. Here is a ZOU undergraduate of Media Studies dragging for an hour only to be coerced to pay, even less than she owes and screams that her daughter has been violated, how on earth do we see integrity in a mother who embarrasses her lovely daughter on Mothers’ day?
What is more devious and irresponsible is how she treats a constituent — the hairdresser during this matter. She shouts and threatens a suffering and hustling woman who works in her constituency. Look at the irony, Dorcas is more of a constituency mother than she is to her family. That is what she signed up for when she pleaded for the 3 500-plus votes she has always got.
She has a sole responsibility of protecting suffering children in her constituency but in this instance, she was keen to devour the patience, hope and sincerity in this hairdresser — her constituency child, who has to put up with smelly hair and dandruff-infested heads to feed her family. I am talking about a woman who has to pay $150 for a chair, $150 for rent where she lodges, school fees, put food on the table, clothe herself and children, and probably put up with an unemployed and abusive husband.
Her only hope of survival lies in sinking her respectable potential only to make someone’s daughter beautiful. Yet the mother of that daughter, who should be her inspiration of single mothers who have made it, women who are a beacon of liberating oppressed femininity turns and makes her prey, like what trash men do. I am sure she wonders what the purpose of feminism is if it’s transforming to intimidate and bully other women like her who should be protected. What Dorcas did on that miserable day was a disgrace to all mothers out there who work hard to pay for services that make their children happy. The hairdresser suffered for being poor.
Where is the sisterhood when wolves become sisters?
The hairdresser, whether wrong or right is a victim in this instance, how Dorcas handled that situation is far from what is expected from a “sister’ who knows that the streets are rough for struggling women. It is women like Dorcas that we start to question if believing in women in leadership is worth it! I realise that she is not the best representation of good women we have in our leadership. She, like the trash men, is an isolated element we should not use to lump everyone because of their character. We expect that as a woman she understands the plight of struggling women by paying in time or not causing a scene for an already stressed and suffering hairdresser. Her womanly attributes seem to always divorce her whenever there is money involved. Remember that the Community Development Fund was scrapped in 2013 partly because of her suspected embezzlement of the funds with other defunct MDCs. I remember sometime in 2014 when she was involved in a fight with a reveller at one of her “amaSundays” (some Sunday party where beer is cheap usually run by Shebeen Queens) for refusing to give her back her change from a $100 note purchase. She reported the matter to the police in Ntabazinduna where she owns a bar and filed a $10 000 lawsuit against a Nkulumane Shebeen Queen Bekezela Nkomazana who she had a misunderstanding with. I am not saying that involving the law is wrong, but all I am saying is that the way she treats other women, especially those who are suffering and look up to her for protection, is disappointing. She has an arid way of using the law to bully women around, particularly those with miniscule knowledge of the law.
You have violated us, the citizens of Bulawayo Central
Instead of unleashing the woman legislature in her, she does a tremendous opposite; she hurls a kraken only found in trash man. When people elect you, they expect you to understand, protect, interact with them amicably and above all be a woman, which is one of the reasons they elected you. When you display a testimony of deserting your constituency role of being a mother to suffering hairdressers, you have desecrated the trust of all informal traders in the constituency. It is the salon workers who voted for you and their other customers. It is a direct attack to barbers, Shampoo girls, beauty therapists, airtime vendors, the lunch ladies, vegetable vendors and even thieves who thrive on selling in those salons. Those are the people you have violated, spit in their face and declared that you do not give a damn about them. Should we then ignore such irresponsible mothers like Dorcas? Should society then conclude that her banditry in refusing to be suspended in 2015 by MDC-T for indiscipline is reason enough to suspect that other good women are bad like her? Should a hashtag be created for her to call her out? Is she the best thing Bulawayo Central needs in 2018 with the memory that a hairdresser, a suffering woman, who is poor like Bekezela Nkomazana be violated for her services? Are we going to be silent and ignore that Dorcas Sibanda possesses a despotic behaviour signalling a propensity of intimidating other women, dishonesty and elements of barbarism? Isn’t she a pathological hoodlum that we need to eliminate to protect our sisters working hard but are threatened by the likes of “successful’ female politicians?
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