You speak like Goodall Gondwe, Mr President
I read with interest an article on December 15 2014 that President Peter Mutharika identified greed as a major problem in the life of Malawians. He reportedly also said he was concerned that people in this country make unreasonable demands.
Let me start by saying that I earn my bread from teaching. I am a teacher during the day and at night. What I do is think, read sometimes, do some experiments when I have the time and learn from them. I also observe things around me and reflect on them. Once I do that, I go to a class or sometimes send emails to my students about things I am thinking about. At the end of the month, government sends some numbers to my bank as salary and the bank allows me to collect some money. The bank does not really get the money from government. It just gets a letter from our finance department saying put these numbers in Adamson Muula’s bank account. I can now withdraw some money from the auto-teller machines.
The bank discussion was a detour. What I wanted to say in fact was that as a teacher, I have listened intently to what Francois Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire is reported as to have once said: “If you want to converse with me, first define your terms.” What I believe he meant was that if you want to debate or have a discussion with me, first we must define the terms of our argument or there can be no meaningful debate. It is clear to me that there can be no discussion of any real merit, without reducing the ideas in question to their simplest, clearest, straight-forward, least-divisible form. So as a teacher and noting that my fellow teacher Mutharika did not define what he meant by ‘greed’, I will define this for you. What is greed? Let us rewind back to the days of Kamuzu Banda. He said if you did not know any Latin, you were a brute, uneducated and uncultured. I agree. Because if your Latin is poor, how can you understand what greed is. In Latin, greed is what is known as avaritia, which in English could be avarice, cupidity or covetousness, that inordinate desire to possess riches, wealth, goods or objects with the intention to keep it for one’s self. According to Thomas Aquinas, “Greed is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things.” In Dante’s Purgatory, “the avaricious penitents were bound and laid face down on the ground for having concentrated too much on earthly thoughts.”
How does Finance, Economic Planning and Development Minister Goodall Gondwe speak like Mutharika? Because Goodall believes the problem with our country is despondency. Mutharika thinks it is greed. All abstract nouns. What is your strategy fighting greed and despondency? Talking about these is not enough or is it?
