It is 11.29pm as I am putting pen to paper and the international media is awash with reports that Pope Leo XIV has had a three-hour lung surgery at the Genelli Hospital in Italy. Cardinal Baldassare, the Vicar General of Rome, has called on followers to keep on praying for the pontiff, who was elected in May last year.
That call echoes what the 71-year-old Holy See sovereign said on Sunday at the St Peter’s Square after his Angelus address. The 267th Pope announced that medics had at an early stage diagnosed a localised nodule in his right lung, asking the faithful to keep on praying.
The curious followed the livestream as events unfolded when he was going under the knife through the Vatican News page on Facebook, X and YouTube. For others, like me, a new word was added to the vocaburary: Aderocarcinoma, a cancer that starts from cells of organs like lungs, stomach, prostate and oesophagus.
When a Malawian social media influencer posted the Pope’s announcement, the thousands of comments were on two opposing fronts. On the one hand, some hailed the Pope for coming out in the open about the pending surgery. They said being a leader, the first Bishop of Rome to come from the United States of America deserved adoration for showing that he is not cyborg, but a human who gets ill.
On the other hand, some wondered why the Pope, who leads 1.42 billion baptised catholics worldwide which is 17.8 percent of people on earth, should go public that he was seeking medical assistance. Their reasoning: Why not just take the burdens to the Almighty? In their thinking, the Servant of the Servants of God was showing a weakness in his faith.
Coincidentally, while all this was happening, the Malawi Government was refuting allegations that President Peter Mutharika who privately and silently flew to South Africa on October 6 had been air-lifted to India for medical treatment. Now, it is a taboo to talk about the president’s health because the official line is that Mutharika’s fifth trip is private just like the others. The Office of the President and Cabinet must have forgotten the word ‘confidential’ to make the announcement denser.
Thoughts about hospitals and life in Malawi reminded me of Head of State, the 2003 film in which the first African was elected President of the United States of America (POTUS). In real life, Barrack Obama became POTUS five years later!
In one of the campaign rallies, Chris Rock acting as Mays Gilliam brings out the irony of workers. He asks: How many of you work in hospitals you can’t afford to get sick in? How many of you work in malls you can’t afford to shop in? How many of you work in hotels you can’t afford to sleep in?
The sting comes when Gilliam talks about pensions. He says the worker toils for 35 years only to see that his pensions have disappeared. After working all those years thinking he would leave his children a ‘will’, it is sad that he leaves them a ‘won’t’.
In Malawi today, pension is the very thorn in the fresh of the worker. Employers are not remitting to administrators and the Reserve Bank of Malawi is just smilling because the workers are not moving it on a united front, as Karl Marx would have it.
These chains and fetters will continue binding workers as they watch the pension funds being loaded in travelling bags after the mighty seal botched hotel deals. Who cares?
It is unreasonable because if anybody cared, we should have been wondering why the dean of a university, aged 60, should tell a 20-year-old graduand to think of entrepreneurship not employment? Why should the president lead in making executive decisions even having a century in their bag when the civil servant they command must pack up at 60?
By the way, how did we agree that the judges’ retirement age rise to 70?
