A Nation With An Issue of Blood!

In the book of St. Mark 5:25 onwards, is laid a classic story of a woman with an issue of blood, who made a resolution to call it ends by touching the helm of our LORD JESUS CHRIST. The story is quite old but best reflect the situation in which the nation is in. The nation has an internal bleeding situation which demands immediate intervention, should odds go to our favour. The disturbing fact with internal bleeding is that no one sees it, and as a result no one controls it, unless you resolve to do something about it. The pain is internal and out of reach for our nearest neighbour, unless one yells out. The treatment is complicated as it demands a careful surgical operation, with attention to detail as life and death is pinned to it. Seriously, our nation needs God’s intervention. I believe if our leaders could diagnose the pervasiveness of the problems, they would stop playing games, put on the gloves and knife, and start working out on our sickness.

We have a twin problem spelled out in one word, ‘inhumane’. Malawian’s long standing reputation is currently under stake subject to the increasing corruption cases and murderous reports on people with albinism, all for the hunt of the old bucks! All these are symphonic to moral delay and over-westernization. One cannot put pieces together on how we have metamorphosed into what we are today. I will only imagine, the very principles of humanity that have slowly been offloaded with the euphoria of democracy gnashing its jaws on our very conduct. How ironic that the nation that lodged over one million refugees from 1978 to 1986 cannot lodge its own endangered citizens from manslayers. How ironic that the same nation laments the killing of its citizens in foreign lands, Mozambique and South Africa, and spends over MK300 million for their repatriation, cannot create safe houses for its 10,000 population of endangered brothers and sisters, whose only crime is their deprivation of the protective skin pigment, melanin.

The brutal witch-hunt for our beloved brothers and sisters born with albinism has been systemic and orchestrated by ambitious and lucratic networks too pervasive to be detected by our law enforcers. So far, by the time of publishing this blog, 17 people with albinism had been murdered in cold-blood, 66 additional people born with albinism abducted without trace, we can only assume the worst, and 28 others have been denied ‘resting-in-peace’ in quest of the millions their bones and body parts can award. Mathematically, the country has been merciless to over 111 bodies of people born with albinism, whose parts have been distributed to places, bargained and sold, without any conscience, in search for a dollar. As if that is enough, many of them have suffered insults, dubbed names, such as ‘mobile money’, ‘walking corpes’ by vendors in our townships and suburbs. This trend at which things are unfolding is an exact duplication of the Rwandan genocide, with a slow motion button placed on remote control. Photos of bones, body parts and all are shared on Whatsapp, and yet, the law-enforcers are simply providing assurance of a better day. The nation has turned too savagery reminiscent to the depictions of ‘The Lord of Flies’ novel which exposes the animalistic passion of a human heart. I have always doubted whether a man would on his own volition abduct another person without having established a market opportunity elsewhere. I have no word to describe the fate and the reputation we have carried abroad for our reluctance to curb this stench once and for all. On one occasion an officer was reported to have connived with murders to offer them an escape from the arms of the law at five hundred thousand Malawi Kwacha (MK500,000), a development which is quite lamentable and very inhuman. We probably have for long disregarded our friends born albinism as less humans, and denied them their right to life. I don’t believe that this brutal surge against people with albinism is born out of poverty, but I have all reasons to believe it as a result of our evil passions, cushioned by the lust for money and value-eroded culture. We have turned into beasts, probably worse than beasts.

The government must act and act now. The president’s call for ‘shoot on sight’ is highly applauded and more should be done. If we all mobilise ourselves in search for these networks, we can kill the plant at its bud. If all our border districts were heavily secured, and whistle-blowers could be placed in strategic positions, we could have dealt this issue once and for all. If we can eliminate the myths in our minds that riches come through the abductions and murders of albinos, and if we can all collectively work to combat this evil among us, I see Malawi rescuing itself from the present peril. The sentences that the courts are producing against the perpetrators of these barbarous acts are both provocative and unconvincing.  They are an expression of whether justice is the vision of our judiciary or not. In one case, a convict was sentenced to ‘four’ years for trading with bones of an albino and another case a magistrate sentenced to 17 years two convict for murdering albinos, dismembering their bodies and conspiring to trade them for a fortune. Putting each other in perspective, Bernard Madoff, a former Nasdaq chairman ‘conman’ was sentenced to 150 years for swindling over 65 billion dollars through fake policies and products. A Former Mayor of Blantyre City, John Chikakwiya was sentenced to three years and two months for stealing 6,000 dollars meant for road construction, yet a former Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Tourism, Triza Namathanga Senzani, bagged a decent three year jail sentence for swindling over 100,000 dollars through the same Malawian courts. Even after the same courts had sentenced Steven Monjeza, a two year sentence for stealing a phone, and a seven year sentence to a Form Four student for forcing sex on his girlfriend who was a minor. Surely, there is something intrinsically wrong with our judiciary system! I need to be schooled on how these sentences are arrived at. There are countless examples of double standards with our courts and should this continue I stand back but wonder whether it is justice or something else being pursued by our judiciary system.

If the government wishes to curb this malpractice, then I believe that the government must necessitate that sentences given by our courts against those who commit such heinous acts are proportionate to their acts. The murderers are worse than human beings, in expression of one Comrade Mugabe, when you reach the level of butchering another fellow being, dismembering his or her breasts, head, limbs, and other private parts for economic gains, you cannot qualify to be called a human being. In other words, we oftentimes demonize the former German Nazi Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, who for a schizophrenic driven agenda, systematically exterminated 6 million Jews, for their hair, golden teeth and national pride, but history will have no mercy on us categorizing us as merciless as Hitler if we do not deal with this evil once and for all.

To pin it together with the corrupt practices in our justice system, where law enforcers shield perpetrators at a fee and where the courts give lenient sentences to convicts, is beyond our imagination. As a nation, we surely are bleeding from inside, and the longer we caress this internal bleeding, the greater the chances for a national fatality.

Maize, Malice and Malawians

This is the trailblazer blog for the year, 2016, a new year that preceded another year full of unprecedented events, the floods that had hit several of our areas, tumbling foreign exchange rate even when the tobacco market was open, an unjustifiably high bill for our 51st Anniversary Independence celebrations, a year which saw promises denied, spite of murderous armed robberies, a couple of fire razes of warehouses, shops, markets and flea-markets. 2015 was not all a bad year, though, we had record-breaking outstanding performance of the Malawian Queens at the world stage of netball, and their counterpart football outfit, the Flames, proved a point by bringing home a COSAFA shield. What worries us are not what has come to pass, but the level of readiness to what is to come.

The three worrisome matters, are contained in the title of this blog, the maize, malice and Malawians. I will endeavor to break down why the matters matter, and disprove the point that it is not the mere fact that they all start with 'M' that make them significant, or would it be.

Maize, is the staple food of the nation, to the extent that maize is the country's food security indicator. During the growing season, 2006/07, the country's food security levels skyrocketed to 3.2 million metric tonnes, thanks to the farm input subsidy programme (FISP) that had been resisted by the donors in its maiden financial year. The country could for the first time manage to export 391,255 metric tonnes of maize, after it had exported only 1,160 metric tonnes of maize the previous year. The country was dubbed a 'food-basket' in the Southern Region of Africa, by experts from the Forum for Food Security in Southern Africa (FFSSA). However, the success story was short-lived after the programme was dogged by perennial anomalies ranging from nepotism, coupons used as vote-buying mechanisms, corruption, failure to exercise transparency in the award of contracts, and all. The governments paid little or no attention in addressing these perennial anomalies, to the extent that it became no news to catch vendors selling FISP-branded bags of fertilizers on the black market. Based on the recent reports from Consumers Association of Malawi (CAMA), the country's 10 FISP programme had consumed a mammoth MK 280 billion in budgetary allocation without a trophy to glory of. The country remains vulnerable to food insecurity, at the pity of erratic rainfall distribution which is hugely affected by the growing climate change evils, such as El-Ninos, producing floods and dry-spells. The nation has not yet found a workable solution to its long-debated food diversification programme on the ground, as masses continue to depend on maize year in, year out. The greenbelt irrigation project remains a decorated policy on paper with little replications on the ground. On a sad note, the tractors procured for the greenbelt irrigation scheme remain static at the warehouse of the country's PVHO, without any MP or lobby-groups making noises to get them moving. One can easily witness a gross posteriority not by our leaders only, but by everyone from policy-makers to the least on the ground. I will not be afraid to say that we have our priorities upside down, spending most of our energies on the call to amend 'homosexuality codes' as though it was the central feature keeping our economy jet-lagging!

Now, allow me fellow citizens to move to the next area of concern, which is malice. Malice is a term that stands for 'feeling a need to see others suffer' or a 'quality of threatening evil'. Malice is not one of the infamous terms in our national anthem, but lately, I have been contemplating that should the need to revisit it grow stronger, the term should find its way into one of the stanzas. The most malicious society would be the one with no regard to other people's welfare, especially strangers, foreigners and nationals. While other societies are as malicious as can be to foreigners, Malawian society's malice is rather awkwardly pointed inward. the trend of the political climate in Malawi. The trends of political opportunism in the appointment of Vice Presidents is one classic example, where soon after the election, a characteristic enmity emerges, the lack of succession plans in most political parties is another dominating example, in almost all political parties in the nation, failure to relinquish political powers and pointless fragmentation in parties subject to lack of unity, is a fruit of malice. The nation remains heavily populated in terms of both its citizens and political parties, the opposition political parties are horses with the same colours, without distinctive political ideologies, and the nature of malice is infectious down to the business fraternity and the common man on the ground, mimicking my last blog, 'A Country is as Good as its Leadership'.

On the last point, Malawians, I would like to throw the closet open, in case someday someone shall read this blog and appreciate the nature of a country, the author once lived in. Malawians have to shoulder all the blame for not living up to the expectations of engineering the nation to its former days of glory. The people's greed and need for a fast-buck has turned us into the deep abyss of thievery, an extreme act of violence against our future generations. We have become very individualistic and materialistic, forming platonic islands which we seek to entrench unspeakable wealth. We pant for the next dollar, but take no regard to legacy. We justify acts of unspeakable evils for the next dollar. It was unimaginable that Malawians had the audacity of massacring innocent lives, I mean people living with albinism, exhuming their bodies, should they fail to get hold of them, and relentlessly hacking foreigners to grab their hard-earned properties. We have over time grown into a monstrous creature that shamelessly refuses to repent. I would only shed crocodile tears for the calamities that is bouncing back on us. The national pride resides in our ability to stamp out the evils among us and stand for the common cause, the welfare of all, not specific personalities. Polar politicization has obviously handicapped our thinking in a way that we are quick to judge the wrongs of political leaders across the lane, than we are of our own. As bwande always put it, we remain amazing creatures on earth.

In conclusion, I will be tempted to include what in one instance with a good friend of mine from church concluded. Malawi does not belong to anyone but us, and we are therefore unequivocally to blame for the mess we have given it. As the year of monkeys unfolds, we better pray God forgive us for the crimes we committed one to another and seek widsom from the Most High. We need a mental revolution and ownership of the state of being. We need to emigrate a culture of legacy and possible, it may take another Ernesto Guevara's form of campaign, taking the dross away from the grey matter. We don't need a lot of foreign aid, we need a lot of foreign exchange in the form of trade! We need revolutionize thinking to unearth the massive wealth that lies underneath the ground. 'Chuma chili nthaka' means more that what we have literally thought it meant!