To be or not to be? Well, contrary to what you must have heard, that is NOT the question. If you must know, the question is: to have or not to have?

And what’s there to have and to be had? A shiny, new Toyota, that’s what. After all these years of being a loyal and devoted customer, I think I have earned the right to have me a new Toyota - one which, of course, doesn’t have defective brakes and will not be recalled for safety reasons. But that’s one chapter I should leave closed. For now.

What I want to know is this: of the over eight million Toyotas being recalled from all over the place for one reason or another, how come mine isn’t one of them?

There are plenty of reasons why I think my car should be recalled and taken back to Japan - apart from the fact that it isn’t new and shiny anymore and hasn’t been for close to a decade.

If my ride were human, she’d probably be on life support - with all kinds of tubes sticking out of her gut. It’s a miracle she moves at all. Everything I hit the pedal, the bloody woman wheezes like she’s coming down with an asthmatic attack. And for some reason, she chooses to put on her worst behaviour when there are cops around. But why that doesn’t surprise me? Women, after all, love attention.

I know. I shouldn’t be saying that, especially at a time like this when the Sisters still have their tail feathers up, celebrating International Women’s Day, pressing home all their advantages and taking every liberty in the book, including those yet to be written.

But hey, it’s the time of the year when we have to show our women some love and I shouldn’t be uttering treasonable statements. You know, like comparing my old Toyota to The Wife, who, in the days of our youth, was known to me as The Sugar in my Tea to my old Toyota. Thing is, when you get to be my age, even terms of endearment change. Worse, when doctors tell you lay off the sugar...

Anyway, in keeping with the spirit of the occasion, I did something which, on second thoughts, I shouldn’t have done. I tried to carry The Wife on my back as a gesture of affection and a sign of my appreciation. You see, I’d read somewhere that actually, International Women’s Day is a cross between Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, you know, a day when Brothers are supposed to step up to the plate and show the Sisters some five-star love.

Now in The ‘Hood where the sun rises in the West and sets in the East and everything else goes against conventional wisdom, showing a Sister love can take many forms. If you are a rodent-loving Easterner like Ziese “Hot Stix” Phiri, then you will cook your woman something special and romantic, like rat in herb and white sauce prepared from an old family recipe handed down from one generation of rat-eaters to another.

Or you could wait for her to come back from The Long Walk to Freedom from wherever they have decided to march from, wash her legs and her feet with warm water and when you are done, massage her limbs with eucalyptus oil. Or, like Clive Hatontola, assemble your 13 wives and treat them to a grand opera in Tonga, after knocking back a couple of bottles of Whisky Black for inspiration.

Better still, you could do what I tried to do but shouldn’t have. You see, sweeping The Wife off her feet, carrying her on my back like a baby and rocking her to sleep while I hummed a lullaby seemed like a romantic thing to do on International Women’s Day.

Big mistake.
For a start, I forgot I wasn’t a muscle-bound 25-year-old anymore. Not only that. I’d also forgotten that The Wife had found bounty in The House of Djokotoe and consequently made a smooth transition from a portable Size 12 to a size ntweno. Now she looks like a cross between a sumo wrestler and a Buddha and weighs just as much! Love, I am discovering after all these years, can be a back-breaking and bone-crunching experience.

But enough about back aches and crunching bones. The ‘Hood was alive with pomp and plenty of pageantry last weekend, though what I seem to recall more was the banqueting and junketing that came with it - especially when the invitation cards come with the inscription RSVP, which, as you know, means Rice and Stew Very Plenty.

A sign that we should come with lunch boxes and baskets to cart away all the grub we can’t eat to feed the Grain Borers we all have in our homes. The kind that have proved resistant to every pesticide known to humankind.

Anyway, this year the neighbourhood fleshpot and den of sin decided to celebrate International Women’s Day with a different kind of beauty pageant.

Because it also doubles as our own House of Parliament where the Brethren congregate seven days a week to discuss affairs of state and matters of public interest over the odd stein of intoxicating cold liquids, Comrade Speaker that in the spirit of showing our Sisters some love, we adjourn sine die to allow the show to go on.

And go on the show did. But believe me when I tell you that this pageant was one like no other. And I should know. We’ve had so many pageants over the past 12 months that I’ve lost count of all of them. Name them we’ve had them. Miss Floodwaters.

Miss Potholes. Miss School Dropout. Miss NGO. Miss Bye-Election. Miss Zambia Closed University. Miss Hule. Miss Cholera. Miss Exam Leakage. Miss Chinese Investor. Miss Born-Again. Miss Corruption. Miss Single-Digit Inflation, Miss Munyaule, Miss Timwenge, Miss Tujilijili… And indeed every single one of them is a queen.

Now I may be gone to a village school where even the headmaster went about barefooted and spent most of the academic year scratching his scabies, but even I know that you can’t have 30 queen bees in one hive (sorry, one ‘Hood).

So the organisers thought they’d spice things up a bit and put together a competition which was a cross between the Champions League and the Royal Rumble. In other words, they threw all the beauty queens in a rand asked them to duke it out. Last woman standing would be crowned Miss International Women’s Day. Didn’t matter what you did to win. It was, as they say in the WWE, every woman for herself.

A winner was crowned all right but her face was so bloodied that no-one could tell who she was, and besides, they all looked pretty much the same anyway. All I say for now is that when the winner’s face gets back to normal, you’ll be the first to know who walked away with the crown.

March may be a month of celebration but not everyone is smiling. My dear sister, Agnes Fonkofonko, for one has nothing to smile about. Firstly, when I run into her a few days ago at the neighbourhood mall, her computer had packed up and she’d brought it in, hoping the technician would resurrect the bloody thing with the kiss of life.

It turned her old PC was beyond resurrection. Either that - or the man wanted to take advantage of her desperation to sell her a Frankenstein. You know, a computer without a soul or an identity. A keyboard from Brazil, a screen from Thailand, microchips from South Africa, cables from Japan, software from China and a mouse from Chiengi.

Wish the same principle could work for people - and one person who’d stand to benefit is ba-Agnes herself. That’s what I told her when she was shopping around for a Mr Right as opposed to a Mr Right Now.

But every Brother I tried to hook her up wasn’t good enough. Or as she put it, they weren’t her type. One evening, over a few steins at the neighbourhood fleshpot and den of sin, I asked her who her type was so that perchance if I ran into him on the streets, I’d know him and point him in her direction and leave the rest to Chemistry.

“Edem,” she said, “I want the ideal man. A Brother as handsome as Denzel Washington, as stoical as the Dalai Lama, as famous as Nelson Mandela, as rich as Bill Gates. A man with the machismo of Shaka Zulu, the intellect of Albert Einstein, the voice of Barry White, the sex appeal of Ricky Martin, the agility of Thierry Henry, the flexibility of Awilo Longomba, the stamina of Haile Gibreselassie and of course, your insatiable appetite for Soup ya Mbuzi.”

I blushed, surprised that, old as I was, I still had some qualities women found attractive. Maybe I should remind The Wife about that sometime. In her book, I am nothing but a lowlife and a cheap skate. It’s all because one Women’s Day, I treated her to a romantic candle-lit dinner at my favourite restaurant on the banks of the Blue Water Dam where, the speciality of the house, Soup ya Mbuzi, costs only K500 a plate. And for an extra zali, they throw in the billy goat’s nuts.