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the school notice board, where a collage of pictures is displayed.
The pictures that captured the villager’s emotions, provoked his thoughts and, made him reflect on those of a group of trainee teachers, who graduated from the college in 1959 and gave service to this country, dedicating their time to imparting knowledge to others, subsequently developing the workforce of this country.

The black and white mug shots have innocent but scholarly looking faces of black Zimbabweans, who wrote their own piece of history that year by joining the civil service.
My late father Ephraim Guvamombe, after whom I named my first son, was a career civil servant, who graduated from Kutama Teachers College in that famous 1959 class and taught for more than 40 years, thereafter.

Sulumani Chimbetu would have called it Nonstop! Yes, 40 continued years of civil service. He worked as a civil servant his entire life and he died in service, just a year before his retirement was due.
Being a teacher in Rhodesia, was no mean feat and as such, he raised us through his salary, right through secondary and tertiary education into Zimbabwe.
Through his salary, he provided for us. Through his salary, he was the first to build a brick and iron-sheet-roofed house in 1963, when everyone else in Nhamoyebonde village was under mud-pole and grass-thatched huts.

A civil servant was a role model and moneyed too. After independence in 1980, things got even better and, I vividly remember each pay day, he went to the small town of Mvurwi, where he would bring goodies, among them, clothes, foods and latest music releases from Thomas Mapfumo, Oliver Mtukudzi and John Chibadura, among others!
That night, he would play the music powering his WRS radio with a PL9 battery and drank his wisdom waters, while we danced and chugged cokes.
Life was sweet.

Years later into Zimbabwe, he was to buy a car, an Austin Cambridge, again a symbol of wealth and good work at a time when four of his children were in boarding school.
We all enjoyed the fruits of his civil service work.
He even encouraged this villager’s brothers, sisters and Yours Truly, to get educated and serve Zimbabwe, through civil service.

We moved with him as he transferred from one school to another – Chimufombo, Negomo, Muzika, Red Lichen, Mamini, Chemachinda, Mvurwi, Nyambudzi back to Muzika – all in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve if we like.

Wherever we went, we were proud of him and his job and, we would meet his products – journalists, engineers, teachers, drivers, soldiers, all professions, of course thieves and prostitutes too – but they all talked highly about him and his service.

He served his country and died an honourable man in 2003.
As he breathed his last from a bed in Mvurwi Hospital, his worry was that none of his children had been in civil service proper.

We were all in quasi-civil service. He had wanted one of us to take over his legacy. That time, MDC-T invited sanctions were beginning to strangle the economy and unbeknown to him, the civil service was to be suffocated and the faint-hearted and the unpatriotic ones left the service and the country.

Today, the revered teacher must be turning and twisting his grave in anger and disbelief given the raw deal being given civil servants by none other that Finance Minister Tendai Biti, who seems determined even to take instructions from the President of the Republic of this country.

It is fact not fiction that the MDC-T Minister is refusing with the money to please his British and American masters who have lauded him as a “super Minister”, who defies his own President because at the end, Biti wants to provoke a situation whereby the President gives a decree and then, they justify calling the head of state a dictator.

What is the essence of taking workers money – most of them civil servants – from the National Social Security and try and rescue a friend’s bank at the expense of the civil service?
Let us spare a thought for civil servants!

What is the logic Mr Biti, if this villager may ask, of buying US$10 million worth of state-of-the-range cars for ministers, their deputies and permanent secretaries, when the rest of the civil service is trying to eke a living out of US$150 per month?

US$150 a month? My foot!
It does not require rocket science or some complex mathematical calculation to see that it is virtually impossible to raise a decent family with this meagre salary.

Among civil servants are great mathematicians but which one can budget and survive on US$150?
It is no mean feat.

President Mugabe has insisted that Minister Biti gives the civil servants the increment, but the “super minister”, has a super story, a super ego and a super arrogance and, a super determination to shred the civil service into pieces and plunge it into turmoil.

The village soothsayer, this ageless fountain of wisdom, says the idea is to provoke the civil servants into a strike and then a demonstration that will then be turned into a North African regime change antic.
“It is a grand plan to provoke unrest which will then be manipulated into regime change. Tsvangirai agrees with that plan and he is working with Biti along the same lines.

“But, I swear with lineage of all my ancestry, the land of Munhumutapa will is not Egypt, Tunisia or Libya. One day, just one day, Biti, will test his own medicine. Mark my words, I said one day.
“Remember what I said the last time about this drum-drilling Minister whose name also sounded frumpish or did I hear you call him a drum or something like that?

“I said just one day, and the day came. Biti’s day will come,” swayed the soothsayer.
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