I had another appointment that morning some 40km further away, but I promised to look in on my way. The ceremony was scheduled to start at 9am.
When I arrived, about a quarter to nine, I found the place in turmoil. The minister who was performing the ceremony had arrived at 8.30! Nobody had expected her before eleven, and we had all heard the stories of ministers who could delay something like that for another few hours while they waited for the TV cameras to arrive. Coming early was absolutely unheard of.
Now, looking back, we can all laugh at that, but what does it say about they way our leaders treat us? In any sensible world people would ask why it should be so surprising that they should come at the time they have agreed, or even a little early if they anticipated delays due to bad roads? Our chiefs, when they were real chiefs, never felt they emphasised their importance by keeping people waiting. And there is an English proverb that says ‘Punctuality is the politeness of princes’.
The habit seems to have come from colonial administrators, and ours were a particularly bad lot. Of course, they were employees, first of Cecil Rhodes’ BSA Company, then of the settler regime. Sir Glyn Jones, a former governor of Malawi, who came here as a member of the Pearce Commission, declared he was shocked at the bunch of cowboys serving as district commissioners and suchlike here. All colonial administrators had their faults, but we got the worst.
These were the people who did not have ‘the politeness of princes’ and these were the ones our chefs modelled themselves on. They treated people with contempt, full of a sense of their own importance. Or did they behave like that because they were unsure of themselves?
Whatever the reason, we got a bunch of leaders who thought they were showing us how important they were by keeping us waiting for them, waiting in long queues for our Ids, passports, birth certificates, any little thing we needed if they were to listen to us and anything we really needed, from exam certificates to social security handouts. (The marriage registry were different, I admit.) Next step: the Big Chef’s guards would beat or shoot us if we didn’t get out of his way fast enough.
Then Our Dear Leader wonders why we don’t seem to love him!
The answer is simple: Chinjai maitiro! It took the MDC to come up with that, but don’t rely on any politician to remember the slogans they used to win an election once they are in power. We hope we will see a change of faces at the top this year, but that won’t make one iota of difference if they don’t govern differently from those who went before them: Zanu (PF), RF, Whitehead, Welensky and the whole crowd right back to Jameson and Rhodes.
If we are tired of being pushed around and insulted (or worse), we will need to tell whoever claims to rule us more loudly than we did in the past.
Post published in: News