Malawi is funny. It is funny strange, not funny ha-ha as some would want you to believe!
What else would you say of a country where a parliamentarian by the name of Ulemu Chilapondwa telling the rest that the ‘local rural’ people don’t need cooking oil, therefore, the opposition were just making a mountain out of a molehill by saying the high cooking oil prices are the result of government failure to make it affordable.
It is strange for a parliamentarian with years of experience in politics like Chilapondwa to utter such hogwash. It is a slap in the face not only for his Ntchisi South constituents but Malawians at large. There is no Malawian who can claim he has no folks in the village so this is an insult on all Malawians.
If ‘local people in rural areas’ don’t need cooking oil, why then do they pack them in those small plastic papers that are called on the street mafuta a mukondomu? Doesn’t that just show that the poor can do all they can to get some cooking oil?
Chilapondwa put his left foot in his mouth and it was too late for him to apologise. Maybe the poor he mocked that they don’t deserve better have forgiven him, but, surely, they will not forget.
By the way, doesn’t the Ministry of Agriculture encourage that oils should be part of the daily diet?
Malawi is a funny country. It is funny strange, not funny ha-ha as some would have you believe.
Where on earth would you see a whole president giving absurd figures of how many jobs they have created? Without telling us where and how the census was conducted, President Lazarus Chakwera in his State of the Nation Address told us over 900 000 jobs have been created since they came to power. It’s a first.
Then, ministers of Information and Labour went to town justifying what the President said and breaking it all down as it were malleable. Funny, nay, strange, it is the working definition the Tonse Alliance uses for job: Anything you do for an hour and brings food on your table. Well, if I am engaged in a corrupt activity for an hour, I have a job. If I spend an hour waiting for someone to pass by and way lay them you have, voila, a job!
Malawi is a funny country. It is funny strange, not funny ha-ha as some would have you believe.
Let us drop that notion. In this case, we will say Malawi is funny ha-ha not funny strange. This is because Bon Kalindo can’t be strange, he is funny. He is comedy in person.
As I write, news is just trickling in that Kalindo has shelved any future demonstrations because he feels he has achieved his cause. To say the truth, fighting for freedom has no end. It has no cut off point.
Real freedom fighters can never go to town that we can stop here, the fight is won. When they win one freedom, real fighters move on to get rid of another form of oppression. Remember what Samora Machel, the Mozambican president said the other day? Alouta continua.
Even Lucky Dube said: Nobody can stop reggae.
On the street, some are reading it that Kalindo may have been tired that he is being sent in and out of police cells. He may be worried that the cases on his head are just too many that he may actually have forgotten which one he pleaded guilty to and which ones he said No my lord!
Others may be reading too much into it to think that he may have been influenced by those he was fighting.
I, nonetheless, Malawi is funny. Funny strange, not funny ha-ha as you think.
