Lies beget lies

Before granting a copy of West African Trickster Tales, one fellow columnist, Ephraim Nyondo, once charged Weekly Agenda writer, albeit in a friendly way, with a lot of monkeys in the column.

But from the look of things, it seems proper to characterise majority Malawians with monkeys or some kind of animal. The country is fast slopping towards a lax conscience whereby the overriding motives of the populace are those that favour one’s cupidity.

But all that Nyondo and company can do is probably to draw some comfort from that, on occasion, the monkeys would move back to the forest as they did in, for instance, the April 12 2015 entry.

When the news broke that President Peter Mutharika’s ‘then’ special adviser and assistant Ben Phiri was being accorded exceptional treatment by government, indicating that he was slowly turning into the power-behind-the-throne, that entry quoted an accomplished Malawian writer Sam Mpasu who reminds, in The Lamp, of one of the most mysterious and dark individuals in Russian history, Grigori Rasputin.

Rasputin—an ignorant, semi-illiterate man— changed the destiny and history of Russia without holding any formal office.

But that is not the only narrative Mpasu uses to illustrate the case of or power-behind-the-throne.

He tells again of governor of Harrar Province, Lord Makonnen, who hosted his Emperor Menelik of Ethopia. The emperor was touring his empire.

Now, Emperor Menelik liked the governor’s third-born son, Tafari Makonnen, and took him back to his palace in Addis Ababa as his page-boy.

Makonnen, however, was such a clever boy that he in next to no time realised that he would have  the country in his hands by simply controlling access to Emperor Menelik.

Thus, he acquired the title of Ras—meaning prince.

While keeping the emperor ignorant, as Ras Tamari, he created his own power structure. He did not only keep all claimants to the throne away from the emperor but also systematically eliminated them. He even managed to conceal the death of the emperor.

Ras Tamari married the emperor’s daughter before he revealed that Emperor Menelik had died five years before.

Eventually, he claimed the throne without challenger. He established his own dynasty and was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie—meaning Holy Trinity—The First.

It is temptingly easy to say none of the two cases can happen in Malawi.

But the moral behind these cases is that the president’s associates, if not careful, use their boss for their own purposes.

And the fall from grace of Kamuzu Banda, Bakili Muluzi, Bingu wa Mutharika and Joyce Banda was orchestrated by some powers-behind-the-throne.

So, it was pleasing to hear that Phiri had resigned from his post, saying he wanted to pave the way for those accusing him of corruption to prove their case.

Phiri added that he was prompted to call it quits also because of suggestions that he was manipulating and influencing Mutharika, citing some critics equating him to a ‘prime minister’ who called the shots behind the scenes.

Whether Phiri was really becoming a ‘Ras Tamari’ or not is beside the point. But the truth is, looking at the history of the past four presidents, Malawi cannot afford to have another ‘Ras Tamari’.

However, if the general feeling among the populace that Phiri could be just playing politics while he remains the President’s closest confidante would be true then Mutharika, as an academic lawyer by profession, is, undoubtedly, aware of the hazards of lying to the public.

There is no shortage of examples in the country when one State House lie provoked more lies, and consequently public mistrust. Lies beget lies.