Breaking news!!

Ophelia Saved the Day
By ABESHEET, SPECIAL TO MY E-SHOE BOX
June 27, 2008, Friday

8 year old daughter of Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe, Ophelia Robertta Mugabe, saved the day.

According to our reporter in Harare, Mugabe had a change of heart when his daughter asked an important question the night before his country’s second round presidential election.

Waddling in her little Mini-Mouse slippers to where her “baba” is, to give him a kiss before it’s time for her “kurara” (meaning “sleep” in Shona, the national language), the little girl notices the worried look on her ole man’s face.

“What’s the matter, baba?!” asked Ophelia, fluent in the English language, as all her classmates at the S.E.S.P. (Sandford English School for the Privileged).

“Oh, nothing daughter” Mugabe replied taking his eye-glasses off, rubbing his tired eyes, and putting them on.

Ophelia waved her tiny arms in a spoiled attempt to show she needed lifting up. She was put on her dada’s ancient knees accordingly.

“What are you doing?!” she asked, sifting through the notepad her father was pouring over, on which the words “gun” and “pen” were written across and down as if for some kind of class punishment.

“Remember those farmers whose land I took?” her father asked.

“Y..e…s” said Ophelia in a sing-along voice “The White Zimbabweans?”

“Yeah right!!”, exploded Mugabe before realizing who his audience was and a pact he made when she was born. That this Zimbabwean won’t be like none other! He tried to pass his hand through her kinky hair “Well, their friends are saying I should leave this palace”

“Oh daddy!”, whined a distressed daughter “What’s to become of us? Are we going to move? Is mommy coming with us? Am I going to leave S.E.S.P. and all my friends? Oh daddy..”

“No chile! No!” Mugabe smiled, his eyes twinkling from within his eyeglasses “we are going to fight! I AM going to fight. You know I won’t let nothing happen to you and your amai”

“But..”, Ophelia hesitated looking at the receding lines of her father’s hair, his worried eyes and wrinkled face..

“Y..e..s?!” it was Mugabe’s turn to sing-along

“But..?”

“Now now, Ophi” the stern father demanded “You know you can tell me anything, I promise I won’t be mad at you!”

“But.. baba, aren’t you too old for it?!”

Thirty minutes before the second round election was to start this morning, Africa’s Desk of BBC World Service (instead of Al-Jazeera slash English’s) received a call from the Zimbabwe President. Robert Gabriel Mugabe requested a live interview in which he apologized for the problems his country has been going through for the last few years, promised to return the land to the white “Zimbabwean” farmers, to make amends with and do the biddings of the Western World and that “the Pen” should rule the day.

“Who would have thought?!” said Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s Opposition Leader, from his hiding at the Dutch Embassy upon hearing the news “siring a child at 75!! And such a child too! Maybe the ole man should have her DNA checked. If he’s heard of it!”

A joke, according to our source, Mugabe didn’t find funny.