Weekly Agenda

The flies and the honey

A jar of honey was upset and the sticky sweetness flowed out on the table.

The sweet smell of the honey soon brought a large number of flies buzzing around. They did not wait for an invitation.

No, indeed; they settled right down, feet and all, to gorge themselves.

The flies were quickly smeared from head to foot with honey. Their wings stuck together. They could not pull their feet out of the sticky mass.

And so they died, giving their lives for the sake of a taste of sweetness.

So, that is what greed for little passing pleasures or gullibility does to even gluttons.

But, interestingly, at a news conference on the first full day of the US President Barack Obama’s vist to Africa, Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta plainly told Obama and the West that his is a sovereign State that does not share the same values with their world.

Kenyatta vehemently said the question of gay rights is “really a non-issue” in Kenya, but rather the country needed to concentrate on other areas “that are day-to-day living for our people”.

It could not mean Kenyans have not read or heard of ‘rights’ and all other Western ideologies disseminated in black and white.

Perhaps, Kenya is way above in almost all sectors of life as compared to Malawi; and more so in the post-one-party era.

For example, 2014 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) published report indicates that while Kenya’s gross domestic product per capita (purchasing power parity) stood at $134.7 billion, Malawi’s was merely $13.8 billion.

Summarily, Malawi ranked fourth from the bottom at 227—beating Central African Republic, Somalia and Democratic Republic of Congo in that order, whereas Kenya perched at 61.

According to Journals Consortium 2015 Ranking for African Universities and Higher Institutions, while the only ranked Malawi’s University of Malawi occupied 61st position among the 100 top ranked African universities, University of Nairobi enjoyed fourth place.

But Malawi—once widely renowned both within and internationally for its hard-working, honest, diligent, among many other attributes, citizens—is stuck in a poverty rut because it has been swept off its feet by the universalising of moral trends and thus in due course compromise on its national identity.

Resultantly, over the last 20 years, moral decay and decadence has gradually crept in and engulfed both the public and private institutions of the country.

The country currently is wallowing in sheer laziness among majority of its populace, corruption and all techniques for easy money and material privileges, including those from the West.

From time immemorial, however, the Western States’ agenda has been to serve and advance their interests and not necessarily to function as a tool in uplifting the interests of the indigenous communities.

It is, therefore, imperative that ethical considerations, which are known to transcend the law, be taken in account when handling homosexuality, proliferation of genetically modified organisms, abortion and so forth.

Such issues have both cultural and ethical implications and cannot be handled with legal and policy instruments alone.

Many a knowledgeable in ‘rights’ and all other imperial ideologies in Malawi has twitted on rooftops about the same, at times for the sake of a taste of some sweetness, more than any country’s citizens, but the country is not only increasingly becoming anthropologically but also economically poor.

One would like to think it is proper for the country, just as Kenyatta refused to be like the flies scuttling for the honey, to realise that, culture being adaptive as it is, it should not be feeblemindedly ready to swallow everything, including even those inimical to human flourishing. n

Related Articles

Back to top button