Who is going to guard a police officer?

Events over last weekend demonstrated to me that Malawi is too far-gone into the disaster of disorderly conduct. The only remedy will be a heavy dose of painful medicine. I was involved in organising the maiden Blantyre Mayor’s Charity Football Shield to Keep Blantyre Clean and Green. The teams involved were giants Mighty Wanderers and Big Bullets. We were assured that with tight management the match could easily raise over K12 million.

We went to great lengths to tick all the boxes “right”; from the ticketing, gate manning system that included keeping the teams’ “kutchola khobwe” syndicates out of the gates, organising over 130 police officers, both general duties and the mobile forces, outsourcing the ticket selling and cash collection and putting in city assembly accounts staff to tally every person that entered the stadium to ensure that every spectator paid.

This was fund raising and that is why we, as organisers, led by example and paid the K5 000 entry fee to the VIP. Mayor Noel Chalamanda and Football Association of Malawi (FAM) president Walter Nyamilandu did the same. When the moment of truth came, these stringent measures made the organisers enemies of the syndicate establishment to the extent that all sorts of insults, threats and abuse were showered at us to the point of nearly being roughed up by those that claimed to own the teams, the self-acclaimed die-hard supporters.

Amazingly, all these challenges, threats and insults were showered right in front of the law enforcement agencies and not a single arrest was made for the infamous “conduct”. This was shocking. The experience from last weekend was clear that the rot that has taken root in Malawi is deep-seated, pugnaciously revolting and nauseating and that Malawi is drowning in a cesspool of filthy rotten sludge of decadence.

The gates opened and hell broke loose as the supporters’ syndicates ran amok wreaking havoc while the hired and purportedly large contingent of law enforcement personnel looked helplessly impotent to act. The worst was yet to come when we witnessed incidents where some unruly supporters who were high on heavy intoxicants scaled the high stadium walls and freely challenged the law enforcers to fist fights. That was the worst case of defiance of authority the author ever witnessed in life. Surprisingly, once again no single “thug” was arrested even for “conduct”.

Thank God the match ended without serious incidents because at half-time we decided to let the gates open and evacuated the money to save whatever little was raised. We paid the law enforcers first and interestingly they took off immediately, leaving us to count the money without any security. This was the umpteenth shock to yours truly.

My conclusion is simple and provocatively naïve, deliberately. Malawi has gone too far down the dusty road to collapse. It cannot and must never be allowed to continue in the same path of the last 20 years. Democracy and its purported freedoms here have been excessively hijacked, abused and soiled by misguided elements to the extent that it has become a demonstration of crazy, as Nigerian Fela Kuti sang.

Citizens that chose to be law abiding are being held hostage by the bravado and the boastful bombast of thugs and hoodlums. It is clear that this madness, insanity and emptiness of thought that has engulfed every facet of our lives to the extent that thugs think it is free-for-all, that even the lazy and the unproductive make demands to get their hefty pound of the harvest when they never went to tend the plantation, resulting in no harvest and yet they expect to feast handsomely. That is foolishly insane.

It is amazing that we have become a country where everyone wants to take and grab without putting in the requisite sweat, endeavour and labour to produce the goods and the spoils to be shared. It is amazing that we have become a nation that has to answer the cynical question I once came across of “who is going to guard the police officer?” Amazing that in the name of freedom and human rights, we have become a nation that celebrates inflicting pain and suffering on itself by rushing to tell the world hugely negatively exaggerated stories about their country as if to say Malawi is just a bus stop where we are temporarily awaiting our ride back to our real home and as such we can litter and soil it with reckless abandon.

Perhaps time has come to concede that Malawi needs strong leadership. What other quarters call a benevolent dictator that will say “enough is enough I have until the next election to do whatever is right and correct to get things right without concern to the petty politics of whether I will win the next election or not as long as I know that I am doing the right thing”. A Paul Kagame type of results-oriented, tough and strong leadership, to heal Malawi of its pernicious malady. Granted the civil society organisations, the media, all and sundry will cry wolf, the political cadres will worry about the next election but who cares for the next election when there might be no State to write about by that time if the right things are not done. Courage boss. Courage!