This weekend someone I know and saw just a couple of days before was murdered. Shot in the head by armed robbers.
Did I know him well?
Not really, didn't even know his last name, but for the last couple of months we have interacted many times on a project cleaning up an irrigation canal. He worked for one of the other guys helping to clean the canal and acted as a sort of foreman since he was more skilled than the rest of the team.
Its a sad tale really about being in the wrong place at the wrong time many times over and it can all be linked back to the despotic government we have had for the last couple of decades in Zimbabwe.
Here is a guy, reasonably intelligent, educated and semi-skilled. forced out of his own country due to the corrupt government impoverishing its people. Here he and millions like him are forced to try to find work in South Africa or they and their families starve at home.
In the time I spent with him he was pretty good with a chainsaw and could be trusted with things you couldn't give to just anyone.
Well spoken and obviously reasonably educated but here he was earning minimum wage in South Africa doing menial tasks as a farm laborer because of corrupt politicians and a corrupt government ruining their own economy.
Trying to earn a little extra on the side he worked at the informal bottle store nearby on weekends and on Saturday, while trying to earn a little extra to send home to his family, he was gunned down.
All quite senseless actually, a guy in harms way, very far from home due to due to policies and practices of those in power, who should have been looking out for their own citizens... not forcing them to compete for meager resources in a land not their own.