People familiar with the Bible know the story of Thomas Didymus, one of Jesus’s disciples, most of whom later became apostles, followers of Jesus. Unlike his colleagues, Thomas Didymus did not believe in stories and logic. Like us, members of this delegation, led by our most indefatigable, pious, and unimpeachable leader of the Bottom Up Expedition, Genuine Prof Abiti Joyce Befu, MG 66, MEGA-1, Thomas Didymus believed in hard evidence as the only proof about the existence any matter.
When Jesus underwent the most humiliating and painful torture as he carried his own cross through via dolorosa, a thoughfare, a mkwaso or a mulimba, in Jerusalem to Mount Calvary where he was nailed to his own cross, Thomas Didymus was there.
He saw Jesus sweat and bleed as he was beaten. He heard Jesus cry out the Psalm of David (number 22), “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” because he was there. When the thief who had been hanged with Jesus challenged Jesus to free himself to prove that indeed he was the son of God, Thomas Didemus was still there. When Jesus promised a place in heaven to the other crucified criminal for his good words about him, Thomas Didymus was still there.
Thomas Didymus was there when Jesus cited Isaiah that he (the son of man) would rise from the dead on the third day. He heard. Anamva. And he waited for the day and time. He saw Jesus die. His sight was perfect.
When Jesus first appeared to the disciples, following his resurrection, the elated disciplines told Thomas about it, but Thomas Didymus was not convinced. He said unto them: “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
Jesus had to appear again, perhaps, just for him to believe. From then, the world adopted the phrase, “doubting thomases”.
Here is why we are telling this story which has already been told a zillion times in the past 2024 years. We are the ‘doubting thomases’ of everything our government and its agents say. That is why each time they claim something, we travel there to see for ourselves, and ‘thrust [our] fingers” into what is being claimed.
So, this week, we are here in Zomba, the City of Zomba. We are lodged at Wadundiyanji. To be honest, we do not know and see the difference between Zomba municipality and now Zomba City. Typical our Thomas Didymus approach, we will only appreciate the “citiness” of Zomba when we ‘thrust [our] fingers’ into what justifies Zomba to be called a city.
But that is not the reason we are here for. We are here to get evidence from the National Statistical Office (NSO) that we, Malawians, are indeed over 20 million strong. We will demand evidence from the NSO of actual people counted in each household and evidence that the people claimed to have been counted were indeed counted on the claimed day. We will demand their signatures or thumbprints. The Thomas Didymus.
What prompted this inquiry was Alhajj Mufti Jean- Philippe LePoissoin’s wonder as to why a country that is four to nine times smaller than its relatively richer but equally rural neighbours can have more people than its said neighbours. Zimbabwe, for exempli gratia, is four times the size of Malawi but Zimbabwe has about two thirds of the population of Malawi. Zambia is nine times the size of Malawi but our populations are almost the same. Why?
We anticipate answers like, “It is normal, palibe chachilendo”. We will not accept such answers. We will not leave the NSO until we “thrust [our] fingers” into the evidence and prove that indeed the census data we use in Malawi is about Malawian people, not Mozambicans, not Tanzanians, not Zambians. We, underpinned by the Thomas Didymus approach, suspect that the population of this tiny nation is grossly exaggerated. And NSO knows whom it exaggerates the population for.
