With Expendables Like These...

One of the most remarkable success stories of the season, in sports and elsewhere, is the octane-fire rise of the ice hockey team, the Vegas Golden Knights. Only in its inaugural season in the highly competitive sport, it has unbelievably reached the finals of the Stanley Cup, ice hockey's equivalent of the Super Bowl. Some say they are on the verge of making history: they are not, they have already made history, the first expansion team in fifty years to make the finals playing in their first season. The team is made up of players practically rejected by their former clubs, expendables in the sport parlance. These castoffs, throwaways, can still be acquired, bought in an Expansion Draft, a particularly distressing flea market peculiar to the sport. It was for no reason they were dubbed the Golden Misfits. But if you think hope had sunk as far as it  could go, consider the obliterating news that the head coach was fired by the Florida Panthers in the 2016/2017 season: a club that, while not taking anything away from their history and performances, cannot by any stretch of imagination considered one of the illustrious names of American ice hockey. The dismissal took place during an away game and coach GG, Gerald Gallant, was rumored to have been denied even a seat on the team bus and had to pay his own cab fare to the airport. If the largest group of outcasts, rejects, write-offs ever assembled in a place, the Vegas Golden Knights was one. Lots of folks joked it must have taken an audacious nerve of naming to have attached  the adjectives of golden and knights to the club. Few, very few expected them to lift their own hockey sticks, let alone a sword and now they roam in a territory where the big boys of the game such as the Detroit Red Wings, the Chicago Blackhawks and the marvelously-named Pittsburgh Penguins used to call the shots.
The odds staked against them reaching thus far was enormous, dispiriting, in all aspects similar to the chances given Leicester Football Club of England to win the 2015/2016 Premier League. Here was a club that escaped relegation by the whiskers the previous season. Leicester went on to win the league, a feat the whole world had said would only be achieved in the realm of dreams. Like Leicester, the Vegas Golden Knights have shown us that the dividing line between dream and reality could be very thin, very nebulous indeed. Their belief has won, the unflagging determination to rise from the abyss of despair to dizzying heights of glory and illumination. Their story would have been a fable indeed if reaching the Stanley Cup final was their sole achievement but we have added goodies in the fact that the Vegas Golden Knights have done good in other aspects, It is the only major sports club, American Football and all, that has Las Vegas as its home and gives the city a huge sense of togetherness, camaraderie, if not unity. The first match they played was only five days after a gunman killed fifty eight concertgoers in  Las Vegas in October 2016. The Golden Knights won the match and provided some upliftment for the grieving city.
So the stones the builder rejected have become the centerpiece of solidity and over-achievement, golden stones so to say. These expendables are not expendable, not on your life and they have shown us that being given the tag of failure, fiasco does not in any way equal the tag of damnation.

President Pierre "Messi" Nkurunziza.

'There is always something new out of Africa'- Pliny the Elder.
But first let's start with an invention in a place far away from this mostly blighted continent. President Trump in far away America forms a football team. American football or gridiron football so to say and names it The White House Patriots. He spends most of his team moving around with this team and engaging all forms of opposition in football matches, a traveling choir providing the entertainment because the president claims to be an evangelical christian. So no Justin Timberlake or Janet Jackson and all that wardrobe malfunction nonsense, just thumping gospel music in heavy metal mode while the president and his team carry out another sort of thumping on the opposition: always scoring at will, always winning silly, with unbelievable margins. Because the president is not expected to be tackled, or roughened or impeded. If there is going to be any engagement, it would have to be the softest of all touches. In essence it is not supposed to be a contact sport anytime the president is holding the ball. So he makes all the throws, all the catches, all the running, all the touchdowns. He is the quarterback, the halfback, the fullback, the wide receiver rolled into one. And naturally he is the superstar and takes all the plaudits. And why not? He is the president of the United States of America.
That is until he travels to Texas and plays a team made up mostly of refugees being held in camps along the Mexican border. Latinos and blacks, guys being held in concentration camps. Fellows who were not in the happy mode at all. Guys who would like to kick some presidential ass. And which they gleefully did, roughening up the president, sending him tumbling into the dirt several times and getting his jersey torn. Respect my foot!
Naturally, the president is not happy about it, not happy at all and he gets the governor of Texas and his deputy arrested and corralled into a little fetid jail. Crime? Conspiracy against the president of course. You can't arrange a little roughening up of the president in the evening and expect to eat breakfast in your own house the following morning.
A very short, dystopian  story? Sure.
But if you change the settings to Africa, precisely to a nasty corner of it called Burundi, and gridiron football becomes soccer and Trump transforms to President Pierre Nkurunziza and the Texas team is replaced by a group of hungry refugees from Congo, you have the latest comedy from Africa. Nkuruziza runs a football outfit called Haleluya FC and as a self-acclaimed evangelical christian, travels with his own choir called' Komeza gusenga which in the local Kirundi language, means 'pray non-stop.'
A real, real comedy. Dystopian to the ends of nightmare. And not funny at all because the governor of Kiremba region of Burundi where the president was made to 'fall several times and kiss the dust' and his deputy are now in even a dirtier jail for conspiring against and humiliating the president. It is not everyday that Messi has his way. Even Messi of Africa.
What is fiction anywhere else in the world can turn into a nasty, grinding reality in Africa.
Yes, there is always something new out of Africa. And most of it is not always pleasant.