Entertainment for every Jim & Jill

Good people, life without entertainment is not worth living. Imagine a world where people are working day and night, making big decisions and delivering vital goods/ services 24/7 without leisure breaks.

This could be a mine field of stress and depression, a prerequisite for incommunicable diseases that burden our health workforce which is already weighed down by malaria, HIV and Aids and other communicable conditions.

Don’t worry; be happy. Contentment has been the overarching mood during the unfolding Moyo ndi Mpamba’s Music4Life regional festivals.

The sight of sparkling smiles on a diversity of faces that flooded the venues in Lilongwe and Mzuzu shows just why every town and locality needs entertainment activities for its low-income residents and visitors.

I am talking about a country where the majority lives below K420 and omit entertainment for other life-saving expenditures. Sure there must a way to bring entertainment even to the poorest of the poor.

Get me right, I am not saying artists, the called kindred who entertain the nation, should not be paid for their labour.

Entertainment is no charity. Elsewhere, art is one the special talents that account for the topmost figures of pay structures.

While the Malawian artist is still grappling with the rungs, through the US-funded Music4Life festivals, the Ministry of Health and its financier USaid have demonstrated a spectacular way of engaging the artists to do what they do best—bringing smiles and vital messages to the often underrated crowds.

With the fun heading for Gynkhana in Zomba this Saturday, encounters in the North and Centre, where the venues were bursting to the seams as people turned out in unforeseen multitudes, shows entertainment is hardly accessible to many who crave it.

But not all is haywire. In retrospection, the successful legs of the exquisitely organised Music4Life shows just shows how artists can work together with various organisation, both governmental and non-governmental, to bring a change where one is direly in demand.

They call it a win-win situation. Artists getting their rightful jobs, change agents spreading their tidings and the crowd acquiring the much-needed leisure and life-saving skills.