Vice President, Saulos Chilima, was on Saturday forced to wait for over half an hour before the start of a diamond jubilee celebrations at St Annie\u2019s Namulenga Parish as the organisers could not complete their arrangements in time.<\/p>\n
Chilima was the guest of honour at the event representing President Peter Mutharika where the church was celebrating 75th anniversary of its existence.<\/p>\n
According to a prepared programme, all arrangements were supposed to be completed by 8am with all invited guests supposed to be seated by 8:30am. Chilima was to arrive at 08:35am.<\/p>\n
Only Trade Minister, Joseph Mwanamvekha, and Information Minister, Patricia Kaliati, who was part of the organising team, were the notable people to arrive before Chilima.<\/p>\n
And as it has been his style, Chilima arrived at the event ground at exactly 08:35am as the programme demanded but at that time, preparations were still incomplete.<\/p>\n
When he arrived, the altar was not yet ready and some officials from the Information Department were seen busy connecting and testing their cables, blasting \u201cone-two, one \u2013two\u201d in the presence of the Veep.<\/p>\n
The joint choir too was not ready to lead the mass with their songs, as they too were busy connecting their speakers, keyboards and other equipment.<\/p>\n
It was not surprising that they goofed in their first song of the event.<\/p>\n
Even the state broadcasting crew that was assigned to cover the event was as well making their cable and equipment connections after the Veep had already taken his seat, as they arrived after him.<\/p>\n
It was evident that Chilima\u2019s timely arrival at the event caught the organisers napping and they were forced to finalise their preparations in a hurry.<\/p>\n
The programme started at exactly 9:09am, more than 30 minutes after the Veep had been waiting.<\/p>\n
Some invited Democratic Progressive Party officials joined Chilima at his dais some minutes into the holy mass.<\/p>\n
But Chilima maintained his silence and perhaps was not concerned as he did not complain of this delay when he was making his speech as the guest of honour.<\/p>\n
Instead he pledged to support the church with 500 bags of cement for its projects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vice President, Saulos Chilima, was on Saturday forced to wait for over half an hour before the start of a diamond jubilee celebrations at St Annie\u2019s Namulenga Parish as the organisers could not complete their arrangements in time. Chilima was the guest of honour at the event representing President Peter Mutharika where the church was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":29153,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29149"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29154,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29149\/revisions\/29154"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}