Please don’t march Hon Bon Kalindo

Parliamentarian for Mulanje South Constituency, the Hon Elias Bon Kalindo has been in the newspapers lately for a threat he has made. The legislator has told all of us that unless the death penalty is instituted as the sanction for killing an individual living with albinism, he will march from Lilongwe Old Town to the City Centre. He has not given us the path he will take, but marching he will do. Not only will he march, but will do so in his birth suit. I do not know whether he will come from home to Old Town already naked, or he will come with a suitcase in which he will pack his clothes when he comes for that one-in-a-century march. Now ladies and gentlemen, I am seriously imploring Hon Kalindo not to march. Please, Honourable member of Parliament, don’t do that to us.

The cruelty that is being shown to people living with albinism is bad. We all need to join hands such that this evil is uprooted from our country once and for all. We cannot have fellow humans being hunted by fellow human beings. Children and other young people have stopped going to school for fear someone will be stalking them and capturing them. I have also heard that even a church pastor has stopped ministering the flock for fear that some people among the congregants may have ulterior motives to kill him. Being a man of God himself, he knows that any or many of his own flock are sinners. Such people will forget that the pastor is a fellow human being and decide to take his life. It is these kinds of stories that Hon Kalindo thinks that if one among us is found guilty of killing an individual living with albinism, the penalty should be death. If no death penalty, then the legislator will show all of us his displeasure by walking literary naked like the people of Mwanza-Neno, whom the Ngwazi (Kamuzu Banda) found ‘literary naked’ when he came from Ghana.

Believe you me, ladies and gentlemen, even if the man was your spouse, naked men are not a pleasant sight to behold. This is much more so if the man we are talking about has gone past 30 years. By which time, the abdominal muscles have started to give way, the hairs have started to grow from the nose, ears and the back. In general, men do not look pleasant when they are in their birth suits. Men need to be clothed. In suits and other clothes, men may look alright but this is a species that should never be wholly naked. It is an abomination.

While Hon Kalindo’s ‘one-naked-man march’ may be taken as a publicity stunt, and we hope he will not scare us in his birth suit, we should not lose sight of the main issue here. It is the precious lives of albinos that must be protected. A person who is born with albinism deserves to live a full life as any other human being. Because albinos are humans in the first place! n