I pretended to be a journalist to get leftovers at hotels, reveals Chizu
By Oliver Chisenga
GOD can lift anything, says Njenje Chizu.
Chizu says he has seen God raise him from being a student struggling to find food to his current position as Vice-President Mutale Nalumango’s press aide.
Reflecting on his life, Chizu recalls pretending to be a trained journalist in order to attend hotel meetings, where he would secretly collect food leftovers to later re-cook at college. Chizu recalled the day he was admitted to study Journalism and Public Relations at Evelyn Hone College in Lusaka.
“Whenever the college closed, I never went to visit my mother in the village; not because I never wanted to, but there was no money for me to travel back home,” he says.
His mother had taught him not to beg or solicit sympathy from rich people, and so Chizu would look for piecework from college management – and get a bag of mealie meal as payment.
“Joe Nkadaani, my then lecturer, was my pillar and can attest to this story,” he says.
Chizu reveals that because he would often have no condiment (popularly referred to as “relish”) to supplement the nshima he cooked, he resorted to unusual methods to avoid going hungry.
“Early morning I would walk to Mulungushi International Conference Centre, Pamodzi Hotel and Southern Sun in search of meetings and conferences, pretending to be a fully trained journalist. In order to convince the organisers, I went with my Hone FM ID. But hear me when I say my interest was not actually to write a story, it was the food organised for the delegates,” Chizu explains.
Chizu would later wait patiently for those who hadn’t finished their meals and collect the leftovers.
“This reminded me of what my mother used to do back in the village to have us survive. I threw bones and kept pieces of meat and chicken in my lunch box. When I went back to the college, I just prepared soup and threw into the pan my little pieces of meat or chicken and that was my supper,” he says.
Chizu says this went on for some time, unnoticed, as he would do it during college study breaks when students had returned home.
“Bambi Lesa alimimya (God has lifted some of you). Some of us alitukusa elo atukolonganika nokwamba ukutupanga (some of us He picked us and moulded us) before He thinks about lifting [us],” says Chizu.
“I don’t know the best way to put this in English but just know that God didn’t just lift my life; He first gathered me from little pieces together because I wasn’t in a capacity to even be lifted. God can lift anything!”