Musings from Cashgate Bar
Jah people, Cashgate is catchy. Allan Nyalo, who has renamed his bar after the K120 billion corruption scandal, seems spot on—for it is said that there is always a shiny side behind the rough half of every mirror.
In Cashgate Bar at Mbwelera, Blantyre, fun-seekers don’t just have somewhere to enjoy their leisure after gulping grim epistles of the newsy scam at Capital Hill.
It is also a scornful monument mirroring the rot crippling our stunted economy, how power people plunder what they are supposed to safeguard with the locks unlocked.
Besides, the hideout which has gone viral shows why politicians must think, think and think before naming public facilities. Sickeningly, the uncreative minds with what Campus filmmaker Allan Ntata calls “licence to loot” see nothing wrong with naming every structure after founding president Kamuzu Banda or politicians of their shady feather.
If corrupt politicians’ heads were not corrupted, the Capital Hill could have been named Cashgate yesterday—just in memory of the scarce billions looted under the watch of potbellies generously salaried to safeguard every tambala from hands that thieveth.
On Mandela’s film
On Thursday, South Africans flooded the premiere of Long Walk to Freedom, a cinematic adaptation of their anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela’s autobiography.
Everything associated with Mandela, 95 and struggling with ill health, becomes dynamite. Predictably, the film was welcomed with resounding reviews amid criticism that it is exaggeratedly reverential.
Eagerly waiting to watch the documentary, I wonder: When will Malawians wake up from slumber to start writing biography of our historic figures? How many more Aleke Bandas, the vaults of our history, need to die before writers and filmmakers rise to their role of immortalising legends of grand achievers. Shall we wait for aged Cecelia Kadzamira to drop dead (God forbid) for Kamuzu’s inside story to hit the shelves?
Sad our education system continues producing writers who cannot write.
This tragedy backs the grim analyses of the entries that flooded Malawi Writers Union (Mawu) Peer Gynt literary competition and the Dede Kamkondo’s poetry contest. When you honor mediocrity, you get more mediocrity. If Mawu cares about standards and excellence, it should simply stop awarding garbage. Choosing the best of the worst is lousy politics, not art!
