Is Malawi’s population really over 20 million?

People familiar with the Bible know the story of Thomas Didymus, one of Jesus’s disciples, most of whom later became apostles. Unlike his colleagues, Didymus did not believe in stories and logic. Like us, members of this delegation, led by our most indefatigable, pious, and unimpeachable leader of the Bottom Up Expedition, Genuine Prof Dr Abiti Joyce Befu, MG 66, MEGA-1, Didymus believed in hard evidence as the only proof about the existence any matter.

When Jesus underwent the most humiliating torture as he carried his own cross through via dolorosa, a mkwaso or mulimba in Jerusalem to Mount Calvary where he was nailed to His own cross, Didymus was there.

He saw Jesus sweat and bleed as He was beaten. He heard Jesus cry out the Psalm of David (number 22), “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” because he was there. When the thief who was hanged with Jesus challenged Him to free Himself to prove that, indeed, He was the son of God, Didymus was still there. When Jesus promised a place in heaven to the other crucified criminal for his good words about Him, Didymus was still there.

Didymus was there when Jesus cited Isaiah that He (the son of man) would rise from the dead on the third day. He heard (anamva). And he waited for the day and time.

When Jesus first appeared to the disciples, following His resurrection, the elated disciplines told Didymus about it, but he was not convinced. He said unto them: “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Jesus had to appear again, perhaps, just for Didymus to believe.

From then, the world adopted the phrase, “doubting Thomases”.

Here is why we are telling this story which has already been told a zillion times in the past 2020 years. We are the ‘doubting Thomases’ of everything our government and its agents say. That is why each time they claim something, we travel there to see for ourselves, and ‘thrust [our] fingers” into what is being claimed.

So, this week, we are here in Zomba [the City of Zomba]. We are lodged at Wadundiyanji. To be honest, we do not know and see the difference between Zomba municipality and now Zomba City. Typical of our Thomas Didymus approach, we will only appreciate the “citiness” of Zomba when we ‘thrust [our] fingers’ into what justifies it to be called a city.

But that is not the reason we are here. We are here to get evidence from the National Statistical Office (NSO) that we, Malawians, are indeed over 20 million strong. We will demand evidence from the NSO of actual people counted in each household and evidence that the people claimed to have been counted were, indeed, counted on the claimed day. We will demand their signatures or thumbprints.

What prompted this inquiry was Alhajj Mufti Jean-Philippe LePoissoin’s wonder as to why a country that is four to nine times smaller than its relatively richer but equally rural neighbours can have more people than them. Zimbabwe is four times larger than Malawi but has about two-thirds of the population of Malawi. Zambia is nine times bigger than Malawi but our populations are almost the same. Why? Where does Malawi’s population live? Amatokhala kwani?

We anticipate answers like, “It is normal, palibe chachilendo”. We will not accept such answers. We will not leave the NSO until we “thrust [our] fingers” into the evidence that, indeed, the census data we use in Malawi is about Malawian people.