Weekly Agenda

Sweet thing with mother-in-law

 

Hare married a beautiful girl but found that his mother-in-law was even more beautiful.

Hare, therefore, planned to make love to his mother-in-law, but without anybody ever finding out, because such an act is incestuous and a matter of great shame.

He studied the habits of his mother-in-law and noticed that every day when the sun was at a certain point in the sky, not too hot, sending out just the right warmth, mother-in-law always went out in the yard and sat in one spot.

Hare dag a hole and buried himself inside it. When mother-in-law came out to sun herself, she discovered that the sun was particularly warm that day. The scene was repeated for a couple of days and hare was very happy about it.

Mother-in-law was enjoying the sunshine; hare was enjoying himself; and, more importantly, nobody saw or caught them in the act.

Unfortunately, there was one silent observer to the whole thing: a gourd.

A gourd has no speech. It was a silent presence. Or so hare thought.

In the evening, when everybody was around the fireside, the gourd started singing that hare had done something very sweet with his mother-in-law. But hare did not let the gourd finish the story.

He threw the gourd out in the yard. But there it started singing even louder. Hare followed it out, crushed it to small bits, ground it and swallowed it.

He was back among company, satisfied that he had silenced the gourd forever. But his stomach began to rumble and the voice began. Hare rushed out and emptied out the whole mess.

The seeds grew, the gourd planted roots, it began to multiply, and now its song could not be silenced.

The complicity between hare and mother-in-law was exposed in the song of the gourd.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa concludes that this great Ugandan writer and storyteller Okot p’Bitek’s tale is a metaphoric confirmation that truth cannot be suppressed.

Sadly, in post-colonial Malawi, there has been a determined political offensive by ruling parties in favour of, in Karl Marx’s words, “the withering away of the State”. The country is plunging deep into the governance abyss of less government and more individual liberty.

To act according to the good is crucial in the making of a good society. But that needs will power or what is commonly referred to as political will.

There can be no gainsaying the fact that the recent sketchy and obscure data analysis-cum-K92 billion report is a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) deliberate misrepresentation of actuality.

The analysis, deposited with Parliament by Minister of Finance Goodall Gondwe, amid fears that his just-passed national budget would be shot down by opposition parliamentarians, simply aims at helping DPP government buy time as it concocts lies to save itself from the canines of the law.

The Cashgate audit report that has led to the arrest of at least 70 people bears testimony that were there will power and moral conscience within the DPP complex, it would not be difficult for the agents involved to restrain their obscurantist proclivities diction and produce a detailed report with surface clarity.

DPP bureaucrats must have done ‘something very sweet with their mother-in-law’—unlawfully dipping their fingers in the public purse when majority Malawians were dying of hunger, poverty and curable diseases.

Or else, the report could not be suggesting another 10 months before the public know the real criminals.

But the truth will someday be out! n

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