The chickens will come to roost, always!

He who brings kola brings life, Chinua Achebe. He who pinches your ear is family (wakutsina khutu ndi m’nasi), Chichewa proverb

He who stiffens his neck will have it broke, from the Holy Bible and its Chichewa equivalent is samva nkunkhu anamva nkhwangwa ili m’mutu.

Chinauluka chidzatera literally translated in English as you can never be in flight for ever because gravity will bring you back to earth, you run out of steam/gas, alternatively, you simply get bored with being airborne and will land at some point or another.

These are wise musings that one would have wanted to believe that all of us, who when are riding high and believe we are at our finest hour, must remember that even the greatest of the great always fade into insignificance and become ordinary and expire at some point in time.

Therefore, eternal supremacy is a no brainer and cannot be a subject of extended discourse because there is nothing permanent under the sun; nor empires, kingdoms, monarchs, fiefdoms, chieftains or dons. A time comes when even the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Haun Dynasty, Greek civilisation, you name all of them, come to an end.

Even today, the American Empire is fast showing signs of fatigue and tendencies that signal the sunset of its glory days, if recent events in the USA such as the government shutdown, the fiscal cliff and the sequestration of 2013, especially when taken in the context of a bipolar economic landscape with China challenging the USA, are but signs of fault lines in a system that shows fallibility and demonstrating that nothing is infallible. Nothing lives forever and nothing is wamuyaya. The Ngwazi, the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) of yesterday and all of us sang and believed that he was eternal, but within less than 30 years it was all over, that’s less than a generation.

That is the reason we must heed calls of advice from all and sundry when we keep on surfing from one tide of blunder to another because there will be a day in the very near future when the ride will be over and we will have to account for our day at the office, whatever our construct of such is: on the highway, in a jetliner, standing elevated in front of ululating, hand-clapping and face-painted crowds, in the field compelling folks to become shepherds or even trans-crossing the terrain dispensing universal supremacies to all and sundry to a point where every folk is a supremo in their own right. All that will have to be accounted for including the important things that our being too busy prevented us from attending to.

Sounds too harsh but it is a dog’s world out there as Shakespeare said in Macbeth “our hour upon the stage is no more” and we had to exhaust, except of course if we were from the rarest of breeds and pedigree like Madiba then leaving the stage would not have to be a traumatic prospect.

Somehow, one still feels that the fury and thunder of all the blunders and misdeeds that we might have engaged in by way of commission or omission, notwithstanding, we would still redeem ourselves if we could have just let the process of getting the army of cohorts onto our gravy train be credible, transparent and honest and giving a semblance of respecting the wishes of the choosers. Not be a sham, make-believe mockery of a process to hoodwink the suffrage and tease them and leaving them feeling not only cheated but used, abused and disrespected.

At least there would have been some respite in the hope that they are dealing with some residual traces of decency and that maybe after the massive looting of their inheritance, they can still hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Alas, the evidence points to the fact that we are too engrossed with flying high that we have totally abandoned all sense of responsibility in the belief that the flight will never land. Lo and Behold! It will land, with or without us. The chickens will come to roost.