Scribes Hit World Headlines

By lute wa lutengano

It seems the marriage of one scribe who was covering the mother of all conferences - the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) will most likely not be sustainable. News coming from Sandton, the third richest suburb in the world, and it is in this poverty-stricken Africa, actually in Johannesburg, South Africa, say that the scribe, who had gone there to report on the summit ended up being in the news, and for the wrong reason for that matter.

Thousands of scribes from all over the world had descended into Johannesburg, to cover the much-heralded summit, which brought more than 65,000 delegates and about 100 heads of state. This by itself was big news. Naturally the meeting of that magnitude attracted thousands of other people who came to interact with the delegates, lobbying them to promote their private agendas or selling them anything from traditional artifacts to sex.

The scribe, one David Masunda, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Zimbabwe Financial Weekly, who booked his accommodation at Mill Park Hotel, and in due course met two ladies who claimed they were members of the conference secretariat from Lesotho. He and a fellow scribe invited the ladies to their hotel room on a Saturday night, for, I presume, a get-to-know each other better session.

Unfortunately, that was not to be. This is how another scribe writing for The Monitor, a Ugandan daily narrated the incident: "After three days at the Summit, the reportedly reputable, married journalist (David Masunda), took two prostitutes back to his hotel room and before he could think much, they drugged him and robbed him. Not only did he wake up on oxygen links in hospital, but his name and photograph were splashed all over the papers in Zimbabwe for his wife to cram the circumstances."

According to another scribe writing for a different paper on the same, Masunda, who was still weak and recovering from the ordeal after spending three days in hospital, lost Rand 2000 (about Tshs 1,800,000/- and mobile telephone. To make matters, his Thatcher, or rather his wife, is alleged to have travelled from Zimbabwe to Johannesburg, to collect her spouse. It goes without saying that things are elephant for Mr. Masunda and nobody would love to be in his boots.

As I digested the news I wondered how Tanzanian scribes who are also world class nocturnal lifers fared. I was not to be let down. Not long afterwards I learnt that Masunda's partner in the saga was actually a Tanzanian scribe. He (name withheld) who writes for The Guardian of the IPP Media, owned by Mr. Reginald Mengi or as they call him in Dar es Salaam, Mr. Condom, also suffered the same fate, though at a lesser level. The Tanzanian scribe is alleged to have lost his camera and an equivalent of Tshs 15,000/- in the episode. Both scribes were discovered the next morning in what was described as a deadly sleep on the cold floor of their hotel room.

Actually a local newspaper even mentioned the name of the Tanzanian scribe involved in the saga. My hope is he is not married, otherwise his marriage might also not be sustainable.

Following this incident I am beginning to get worried that we, the scribes from this region, are beginning to hit headlines for the wrong reasons. Zimbabwe and Tanzania may be among the poorest lands in our globe, but when it comes to tragic-comedy nocturnal activities their scribes are top-notch world-beaters.

Prudence calls for Mr. Mengi, who of late has hit local headlines for getting into loggerheads with religious leaders on the condom issue, to flood his office empire with condoms. Judging by what happened at Mill Park Hotel, it seems to me that some, if not most of his staff, do not follow and abide to the religious exhortations of total abstention from sex. That being the case condom is their lifeline.