Of horny chiefs and moral bankruptcy

What kind of country are we living in? What type of people are leading us in these communities?

For a traditional leader to take advantage of a poor girl’s suffering to satisfy his sexual appetites is gross—and even that is putting it mildly.

Around half of Malawi’s population is starving, according to the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee (MVAC), which is the country’s most authoritative voice on hunger estimates.

Like vultures circulating around a dying animal, some relief workers and traditional leaders have sensed a quirky opportunity in this food crisis that has mostly affected women and children.

They are exploiting the wide spread starvation caused by the twin problems of floods and droughts that ravaged most parts of the country, especially the Lower Shire in the Southern Region.

Now horny chiefs and aid workers are taking advantage of the situation to have sex with women and little girls, some as young as 13, in exchange for favours—a bag of maize that is supposed to be distributed freely, but for which the women and girls are paying with their bodies—and their pride as women and, in some cases, as mothers.

For the girls, they may well be trading the relief food with their future—if not their very lives—because chances of them contracting HIV and getting unplanned pregnancies from the sexual encounters are high.

At first glance, the girls and the women might appear willing toys, but one needs to look at the realities of staring hunger in the face, of little children clutching their mothers demanding food they do not have or cannot access; to understand why some of them even jostle to get the chief’s and aid workers’ attention—and into their beds.

If the people we trust as moral compasses in our communities, the very folks who should embrace all children in their villages as their own are abusing their powers so shamelessly take away the dignity of their female subjects by having sex with them as a medium of exchange, what is the fate of our values as a country?

There is something stinkingly wrong at the core of our moral fabric.

And we know where it comes from: the most influential opinion leaders in our communities—from where we all originate.

Should you wonder why there is so much corruption in our society? Look at your village head, group village head, traditional authority, senior traditional authority or even your paramount chief?

Our traditional leaders have become the symbol of what is wrong in our society that makes us, for example, so corrupt and fraudulent; so morally bankrupt.

Look at the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (Fisp).

The chief tinkers with names of beneficiaries so that his or her favourites benefit at the expense of deserving people.

He or she even sells coupons that don’t below to him or her. If you have ever bought land, have you ever experienced the greed and corrupt behaviour of chiefs?

If you have ever been involved in a dispute at local level that the chiefs have to preside over and make a determination, have you ever seen how they can trade their integrity and impartiality for a village chicken or K500?

The subjects who corrupt them look at this and believe it is normal. They pass on the same to their children, friends and relatives—eagerly spreading the culture of corruption and impunity that finds its way to Capital Hill, other public institutions, non-State actors and the private sector.

In the end all this snowballs into one big happily corrupt Malawian family where a traffic cop flagging you down will need K2 000 for you to pass through with your unfit vehicle.

An Immigration officer needs K20 000 into his personal pocket to help you get a passport you have already paid for; a public hospital worker demanding K5 000 from a poor villager to undergo surgery; an Escom and Water Board official expecting a K25 000 bribe to connect your house to the electricity grid.

The list goes on.

Corruption has become a culture, an acceptable way of getting ahead—and it begins with the village head and spreads to local leaders and now it has become a national cancer that has spread too widely to tame.

Yet everyone expects the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) to magically wipe it all away; the same underfunded, under-staffed and under-appreciated body.

Sometimes we expect too much when the problem is right from our village, our homes and our ways of life.