Zimpapers Logo

Stephen Mpofu, Perspective
Some in our society will no doubt concur with this communicologist that time is long overdue to regard people who recklessly brandish bare faces everywhere in these danger-ridden days, imperilling their own and the lives of other people with whom they interact as anathema in our society.

Indeed responsible Zimbabwean publics should not merely thumb their noses at what they see and look the other side as if away from characters rehearsing theatrics in a wide television screen.

We are talking here about something more serious than a tragic comedy — people who appear, their faces unmasked, in public and other open spaces and smack into air crippling with the deadly coronavirus that they inhale through nose and mouth from being infected by the deadly virus or spray the killer germs themselves into those that they interlocutor with.

Sooner or later or concurrently, they will ignite the devastating fire on others while engaging in self-emollition themselves albeit unintentionally.

But what does the concerned general public hear from some corridors of political power in the state?

Yes, you (yes, you) are right: crooning voices as if renditioned in a hit comedy: “people are not wearing face masks, are not social distancing and are busy holding family gatherings, which they should not as they endanger the lives of people, but should instead have these gatherings after the festive season, in the new year, with everyone still alive”, blah, blah, blah.

Tragic, or is it not?

But the fight against the deadly Covid-19 rampaging across the global village and decimating lives and economies is not a love affair where partners persuade each other to not behave in ways that endanger their romance.

Me thinks, as William Shakespeare would say, that the legislative arm of our state should flourish a legal knobkerrie with which to bash respect for members of the opposite gender into the heads and hearts of bestial men driven by a propensity for sexually ravishing girls, jeopardising their education and prospective future careers and husbands of their own choice, not to mention their roles in developing the motherland.

Current, flagrant violations of regulatory measures introduced by our Government to curb the spread of the coronavirus can only suggest to any reasonable person that the culprits see through the measures, as it were, as nothing but pieces of paper on which the rules are contained flapping, like tree leaves in the wind.

Of equal significance, time appears propitious for the powers that be or for Parliamentarians to cause into effect legal virtual castration of sexual offenders so that the courts may throw behind bars those found guilty of sexual violence offences for periods considered so long that when the criminals finally come out of jail and catch the sight of a woman their masculinity will turn neuter for a while as a sign of the man’s moral transformation for better.

Well, some sceptics might dismiss the virtual castration law as being draconian. But no, it is not like grabbing a fluffy pet cat helping itself to the meal of a sleeping baby girl and smashing the creature against the wall as punishment.

Raping and violating an innocent girl is gender brutality, deserving the harshest of penalties.

When all is said and done, any talk about equality between men and women in our society will be a fake lullaby as long as gender violence in all it forms against women continues surreptitiously in our society, or so, this journalist-cum-sociologist believes.