Poor bald-headed man
A devil took possession and made a bald-headed man who was very poor and sick.
The poor man could not invite a holy priest to read prayers for him, so he invited a lay-brother in his stead.
After a while, the priest began to get very hungry. It was the custom to give the priests the best of food, but the poor man had no fine things to eat.
He had only one goat.
So the priest began to think to himself that if they would kill this goat, he would have plenty to eat, as it was really pretty fat.
The poor man now came up and sat near where the man was praying.
He heard the priest mumbling his prayers: “The gods say if a man is bald-headed and will take the skin of a goat and put it on his head, he will have hair.”
The poor man heard him say this over several times and finally decided it was there in the command of the gods; so he killed the goat.
They all had some good eating for a while and the poor man put the skin on his head, wore it and wore it for days and days and kept feeling his head, but not a single hair would come.
He concluded that the man had lied to him out of the prayer.
So Vice-President Saulos Chilima
Chilima might have missed another important moral lesson from the folk wisdom he drew the analogy of untamed snakes from: that family issues are not meant to be sung in public, zakumzinda saulula.
But if Mutharika is so shortsighted that he cannot see the snakes around in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration, at least he has sharp ears that he can hear far.
Malawi is one of the most unfortunate countries in Africa, if not the whole world, which has been taken for ride by fortune-seekers masquerading as political leaders.
Inherent in such ‘snakes’ is the imperative that they should remain powerful until death deprives them of the capacity to exercise power.
They, therefore, use even illegal or immoral means, including making the leadership believe they are the goatskin to make the leader’s bald-head grow hair, to gain undue wealth and advantage for themselves, their relatives and friends.
Unfortunately, due to desperation and love of living in fear of the unknown, the country’s presidents have invited to the dining table such ‘snakes’, thereby promoting a syndrome of trample-you-first-lest-you-be-
The kind of political stagnation that has rocked the country for the past 51 years vindicates the fact that the warm but very poor heart of Africa is yet to produce a first-class political leader.
Mutharika is not all bad. His approach to the West and East and his extension of olive branch to every perceived political foe, for example, is pragmatic.
His association with former president Bakili Muluzi, for example, is a great gesture of reconciliation common in quality leadership that focuses on national unity intended for national transformation.
But the President must rid his administration of the ‘snakes’ if he is to preside over the rapid increase in criminal activities and the economic woes that are becoming unbearable with each passing day.
The many ‘snakes’ Chilima alluded to—as well as Muluzi—have no goatskin to make Mutharika’s political bald-head grow hair.
