I can afford to laugh now, but don’t think I am being callous. Even in times of misery, people find time for a chuckle. Zimbabwe, once the food basket of Africa, is going through a spate of such misery  that is just but saddening.

I cannot help laughing, however, when I remember what happened in Harare, the capital city, last Monday (December1, 2008). It was reported that dozens of soldiers ‘ran amok, after losing their temper while queuing up to withdraw cash at a bank’.

It amused me because, here in Rwanda, the imagination of our highly disciplined gentlemen and ladies in uniform rioting cannot remotely occur in my mind, ever. Yet, how people forget so easily!

Of course, ‘people’ here includes me because practically all my life, until only 14 years ago, I’ve lived in a world of rampaging soldiers who looted, raped, killed and maimed at will.

That was in 1959 and thereafter being chased out of Rwanda unceremoniously, when a regime that did not have an army of its own nevertheless set Belgian and Congolese soldiers against us, a section of its own people.

When we thought we’d leave the Rwandan mayhem and settle in Belgian Congo (today’s D. R. Congo), you would think we triggered the Congolese into remembering to send their soldiers after us.

When Mulele Mayi insurgents struck from the jungles of South Kivu in 1964, the Congolese soldiers came down hard on us where we were in North Kivu, sent by a regime that wrongly thought that by flushing us out, it was flushing out the rebels.

I wouldn’t want to go into all my woes with soldiers in Uganda in 1971 for instance, or Kenya in 1982. But in all cases, it shows that a regime that misuses its military will only be digging its own grave.

For doing exactly that, Rwanda never knew peace until RPF plucked it out of that grave in 1994.

D. R. Congo lives in that grave to-date and it is yet to determine its own destiny, if at all.

In Zimbabwe, the amusing thing about the soldiers was that they were not a well armed group and only went on rampage, looting and mobilising civilians join them in the  looting spree, as riot police used tear gas to disperse them. The soldiers may have gone, but it won’t be amusing the next time they come out of their barracks.

Woe unto Sekuru (as President Mugabe is known in Zimbabwe – not unfamiliar in Kinyarwanda) if the inflation will not have climbed down from the dizzying rates registred so far then he will need to fortify his palace in a mre robust manner.

A rampaging and looting band of hungry soldiers usually finds it easy to remember demanding for payment of services rendered.

Poor Sekuru, does he remember that the other day he had sent them to Matebele-land to quell a nagging noise that dared question his methods of work?

Or that the other day, again, he had sent them to extract a reluctant vote from whoever mistakenly thought that time for change had come prematurely?

Only recently perhaps the one of the most promising economies in Africa, Zimbabwe is today crumbling and taking in its very last breaths. I can’t think of anything that can be done to liberate it, short of a miracle.

But, come to think of it, I know such a miracle. Rwanda rose from the dead in 1994 and is today galloping at a dazzling economic growth of some 7%. Whoever wants a lesson wouldn’t wish for better example.

Contact: ingina2@yahoo.co.uk