I did not waste my time to listen to President Peter Mutharika\u2019s State of the Nation Address (Sona) for the obvious reason.
\nAs far as I can remember, Mutharika\u2019s speeches have serially been drab and redundant and hopeless. You cannot be inspired by them. So, on Friday, I chose to play deaf to whatever the old man decided to tell us.
\nGrowing up, I was taught that it is pointless to listen to things that will neither inspire nor give me hope just as those I know are nothing but fabrications. The few times that I have laboured to listen to Peter\u2019s speeches, all I have been left with is some irritating aftertaste of boredom and anger about a leader who is clearly clueless but thinks otherwise.
\nThree-and-a-half years under Peter\u2019s leadership, Malawi has plunged to a new low that has made us a laughing stock even to people of a country which we exported presidents to. We really need to be ashamed.
\nI must confess that I really hate it that I should look like I bank the nation\u2019s hopes on an old man who is cruising towards 80. But because this old man chose to offer himself to lead the nation\u2014 and with that enjoy all the luxuries attached\u2014then he cannot be spared our vitriol.
\nPutting it in raw terms, Peter should hang his head in shame for presiding over a torturous ceremony of our times. This country is in a mess and Peter knows it. I have a gut feeling that he just does not care an inch that we have become such a pathetic nation. What baffles me is that Peter spent half of his life in a developed country, US, and you would expect such a man to learn about some standards and class. But he did not. All that was imported to this part of the world is drudgery, corruption, tribalism and all the bad you can think of.
\nI will be utterly shocked if Peter decides to offer himself for leadership again in 2019. To me, that will only be giving the country a middle finger while staring at us wryly. If Peter had respect for this country and its people, surely he would step aside a long time ago to give a chance to some people capable of running affairs. But, as I said before, one thing that demoralises me is that, looking around, the options are too thin for us.
\nOf course, because he is protecting a legion of his cronies who are steeped deep into corruption, Mutharika will remain a front man for the blue bandits. It is that old tale of power and protecting the dirty and the wrong.
\nWhere I have been for the past weeks, there is a sad but inspiring story about how one man can take a nation captive and how the same can be defeated by a people tired of absolute imprisonment. This is a man who, for a quarter of a decade, taught the nation to be content with whatever filth his leadership offered. Today, people think otherwise.
\nAt home, we might deny it but we are in the same situation where one man can decide to torture us and only spare his hangers-on. Let me not hide it here: I am talking about one Peter Mutharika; the man who is enjoying our taxes, yet he is failing to sail this ship called Malawi. For the period he has been in power, Peter has not shown any leadership skill or willingness to change things for the better.
\nWhen the other day I read that the court had decided to send the self-proclaimed leader of People\u2019s Land Organisation, Vincent Wandale, for a psychiatric test, my primary reaction was that of shock. I think people who need to go for such test are those who still believe Peter is the best leader this country has and that criticism of his leadership is based on congenital hate.
\nI feel bad that political jingoism has even hypnotised some into defending the nonsense that we have right now and, sadly, the plague is more on the youth. Just go on the social media for evidence. I refuse a trap to a lull of bigotry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I did not waste my time to listen to President Peter Mutharika\u2019s State of the Nation Address (Sona) for the obvious reason. As far as I can remember, Mutharika\u2019s speeches have serially been drab and redundant and hopeless. You cannot be inspired by them. So, on Friday, I chose to play deaf to whatever the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":52459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56025","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\/56025","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=56025"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56030,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56025\/revisions\/56030"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}