One of the most creative — I wish I could call it brilliant — ideas government came up with to commemorate this year’s Independence Day on Monday was to come with a list of 14 individuals who were honoured for one achievement or the other.
Why 14 and not a hundred or a thousand, I have no idea. Why it was conceived in the first place, I absolutely have no clue. But it’s not a bad idea in itself. There are a lot of people out there whose contributions most of the times go unappreciated and if this list was created to fix that anomaly, I have no reason to complain.
But I have a feeling that the honours list, incomplete as it, is not too fair and has honoured some individuals for being at the right place, at the right time. Does anyone, for instance, see any achievement in being the first woman to be in Dr. Kamuzu Banda’s cabinet? I have no idea what her citation was but if it was for the fact that she was the first woman to be in cabinet, it was no achievement—just as there is none in Joyce Banda being vice president of Malawi.
She was elected on the same ticket as President Bingu wa Mutharika, yes, but what is her contribution to that result? Is it quantifiable? Would Bingu have lost had he partnered with someone else?
Take Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf; she has everything to celebrate about. She won it as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf — she didn’t ride on the back of another candidate as a running-mate.
Don’t get me wrong about the first woman cabinet minister; she was surrounded by all these men — chauvinistic we may add — but during her time, did she do anything worth remembering, worth celebrating? Did she help the cause for the upliftment of women? Perhaps, I may be too young or too naive or both to appreciate her role.
But, of course, my point was neither about who missed the boat, for you can be sure there are thousands of people who were missed on that list of 14, nor was it about why X was honoured where his misdeeds and achievements are just as prominent as Y.
On the contrary, I was more amused by the fancy title which some joke of a committee decided to confer on President Bingu wa Mutharika: The Most Excellent Grand Commander.
It appears we are in that season and I loathe to think these are the signs of the times. Just a few weeks ago, some parliamentarian conferred on our good old president the novel title of ‘Doctor of Development’; yet another one rehashed the Mchikumbe No. 1 title (a preserve, we thought rather naively, of Dr. Banda) and threw it in the direction of Mutharika as well. He is also Ngwazi, Mose wa Lero, Mthesa Njala...
We are in that period when we are falling over ourselves to spoil the president with titles for doing what he ought to do. If, as a president, he can’t guide the nation to prosperity, then who can? If parents provides for their children, do they deserve more gratitude than what are naturally due to them?
It is a nasty trait, this ‘titlemania’, especially in dictatorial regimes and I shudder to think we are swimming headlong into that direction — just a paltry fifteen years after emerging from one.
At the pace we are going, it won’t be long before some crackpot suggests that we have a third term (or others like to say it, a sad term) bill. With the numbers the DPP has in Parliament and the zeal with which some people would like to please Bingu, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
This year’s celebrations were about Malawi’s 45 years of independence. What we got were heaps of praises of President Mutharika’s achievements in the last five years! What happened during the other 40 years???
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
An independent thought
We celebrated, or rather, we commemorated Independence Day on Monday, July 6. But is it enough to celebrate independence because it is a milestone or because we feel contented to have achieved something? What, I wonder, have we achieved worth celebrating about? Is freeing ourselves from the shackles of colonialism and imperialism enough cause for celebrating?
All that we managed to do was to supplant white colonialists with black ones, our own, whose only major positive point is that they can speak the language without necessarily speaking our language.
Just recently, we (or rather, government) celebrated ourselves senseless for coming second to Qatar in terms of economic growth in the world, yet the level of poverty among our people falls short of being outright immoral — 45 years after independence.
It is fashionable, more especially in the recent past, for people (on second thoughts, government as well) to survive by handouts. If that was not vindication that our people are far from independent — economically or otherwise — then I don’t know what will.
In football, our so-called national sport, for instance, about two years before independence, on October 15, 1962, we suffered the indignity of loosing 12-0 at the Rangeley Stadium — now Kamuzu Stadium — to Ghana. Yeah, Ghana might have been (and still are) the heavyweights of the game on the continent, but about 47 years on, we are still clueless about what to with the game.
Malawi remains something still of an enigma (a fact which some quarters, no less administrators of the game, celebrate gleefully). The Flames are a team that can embarrass continental champion in Egypt and a few months later, they are humiliated by the lesser fancied Burkina Faso.
How can we celebrate independence to its fullest when our electricity supplier, Escom, still functions with efficiency of a disaffected pre-colonial civil service? If the electricity is not tinkered by a notorious monkey, then plain insolence and cluelessness by someone who is supposed to know befuddles the system altogether.
As we celebrated our independence, some parts of the country were in darkness because some system is up to its habit of breaking down.
It beats me when we claim we are independent when the water system we are using in the cities remains pre-colonial. We have allowed ourselves to witness decay before our eyes and celebrate it.
Yes, the opposition has been blamed for shooting down this loan and that loan that could have rectified the water system, the electricity supply and all that load of tosh. Oh yeah, but that was only in the last five years; we have had 40 years behind us during which time the best things we did for ourselves was to sing praises for our leaders who only capitalised on the historical inevitabilities.
We have leaders, who, 45 years after independence, can’t entertain diversity of thought; leaders who don’t know how to walk away from their failures.
Some independence for sure!
All that we managed to do was to supplant white colonialists with black ones, our own, whose only major positive point is that they can speak the language without necessarily speaking our language.
Just recently, we (or rather, government) celebrated ourselves senseless for coming second to Qatar in terms of economic growth in the world, yet the level of poverty among our people falls short of being outright immoral — 45 years after independence.
It is fashionable, more especially in the recent past, for people (on second thoughts, government as well) to survive by handouts. If that was not vindication that our people are far from independent — economically or otherwise — then I don’t know what will.
In football, our so-called national sport, for instance, about two years before independence, on October 15, 1962, we suffered the indignity of loosing 12-0 at the Rangeley Stadium — now Kamuzu Stadium — to Ghana. Yeah, Ghana might have been (and still are) the heavyweights of the game on the continent, but about 47 years on, we are still clueless about what to with the game.
Malawi remains something still of an enigma (a fact which some quarters, no less administrators of the game, celebrate gleefully). The Flames are a team that can embarrass continental champion in Egypt and a few months later, they are humiliated by the lesser fancied Burkina Faso.
How can we celebrate independence to its fullest when our electricity supplier, Escom, still functions with efficiency of a disaffected pre-colonial civil service? If the electricity is not tinkered by a notorious monkey, then plain insolence and cluelessness by someone who is supposed to know befuddles the system altogether.
As we celebrated our independence, some parts of the country were in darkness because some system is up to its habit of breaking down.
It beats me when we claim we are independent when the water system we are using in the cities remains pre-colonial. We have allowed ourselves to witness decay before our eyes and celebrate it.
Yes, the opposition has been blamed for shooting down this loan and that loan that could have rectified the water system, the electricity supply and all that load of tosh. Oh yeah, but that was only in the last five years; we have had 40 years behind us during which time the best things we did for ourselves was to sing praises for our leaders who only capitalised on the historical inevitabilities.
We have leaders, who, 45 years after independence, can’t entertain diversity of thought; leaders who don’t know how to walk away from their failures.
Some independence for sure!
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