For our farm tractors, we will march naked

To be honest, this week we wanted to talk about the football World Cup and reflect on Brazil’s humiliation. But we will not. As representatives of the owners of Malawi and employers of the President, Members of Parliament and the councillors, we feel we have a more urgent and serious issue before us. Of course, our expedition, comprising Abiti Joyce Befu or MG 66, Native Authority Mandela, Innocett Mawayawaya, aka Achokechoke, Sheikh Jean-Philippe Lepoisson, SC and I, wished the Samba Boys had won. But the football World Cup fiesta is behind us now. Ahead of us, there is still the issue of our farm tractors and maize shellers.

Where are they? The rumour-mill is awash with stories that some of the tractors are on somebody’s farm in Malawi and the SADC region. How they got there, the rumour-mill does not say. Even the king of Facebook defamation, deleteriousness and symbolic annihilation, the infamous Innocett Mawayawaya, has no idea. Mawayawaya is now on our side because, he alleges, the DPP government has not given him the job he was promised in payment for defaming and threatening people who seemed to support the opposite political view. Mawayawaya is bitter because the government is demanding a university degree as a prerequisite for getting a job when all along nobody talked about degrees. We have accepted him into our expedition because we sympathise with his stupidity.

To be honest, we are extremely disappointed at the lukewarm approach our elected leaders, Cashgate civil servants and self-promoted non-governmental authorities have displayed vis-à-vis the location of our farm tractors and maize shellers. Some even had the audacity to question our sincerity in raising the issue today. They have argued, foolishly, that we should have raised tractorgate yesteryear and not this year.

We are angry because those responsible for handling the farm tractors that our own Ngwazi Professor Bingu wa Mutharika, Ngwazi Dr Kamuzu Banda and Ngwazi Dr Bakili Muluzi bought for this country are not willing to come forward with information and tell us where 154 farm tractors and 144 maize shellers went or how such sturdy assets could just have evaporated without trace. Cash stolen during Joyce Banda’s and (if you believe) Professor Bingu wa Mutharika’s regimes was easily hidden in car-boots, underwear, brassieres, stomachs, offshore and Malawian banks, pit latrines and riverbanks. We can understand that. It was not easy for us, owners of this country, to know that money was being hidden in such places. However, farm tractors cannot just disappear like cash.

So, where are our tractors? Our maize shellers? Our ploughs? Where are they? Zinanka kwani?

Since no one in a position of authority in the Cabinet, in the police, in the Ministry of Agriculture, in the Plant and Vehicle Hire Organisation (PVHO), in CAMA, in NGOs, in churches and in mosques, in or the Nyabanghi House, is willing to tell us who has our farm tractors or where they have been stored, we will march to Lilongwe via Blantyre ADD and PVHO.

Abiti Joyce Befu, MG 66, our leader of the Bottom-Up Expedition, has threatened to go and undress before the members of parliament next Friday. She says she will not dress up until the tractors are located. This she has promised to do whether or not the government unleashes its instruments of terror and citizen suppression like it did during the July 2o, 2011 massacres. We will march because we are confident that we will be warmly received at Parliament. Our no nonsense colleagues and friends are there. The mother of academic freedom and anti- executive arrogance in Malawi is in Parliament; the president of smallholder farmers is in Parliament; the soldier of the poor is in Parliament and even the Mulanje Mountain voodoo priest is in Parliament. Abiti Joyce Befu is serious and adamant about the march.

In solidarity with her act of defiance, we, the men in the Bottom-Up Expedition, will also undress and march to Parliament bunobuno. We have agreed to remain in Lilongwe, outside the Parliament building bunobuno, until our farm tractors are brought before us. They are ours and we need them back just as we need the Cashgate loot back. Now!

If any person thinks we are joking, they should come to Parliament buildings, City Centre, Lilongwe.