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???
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