Until that
moment, April 5, 2012 had been a rather uneventful day. I had been sitting at
my rather ancient desk, probably drafting something. I must not have been
engrossed in the task at hand because as soon as the tiny red light on my
Blackberry started flashing, indicating receipt of a message, my hand reached
out for it. It was a Blackberry Messenger message from my uncle. ‘That prophecy must have been ours after all!’
It read. ‘What are you talking about?’
I quickly shot back my heartbeat picking up a pace. But I need not have asked
really. For close to 3 months then, the country had eagerly been awaiting the fulfilment of T.B. Joshua’s prophecy. Now
T.B. Joshua is a Nigerian teleprophet,
who commands quite a significant following especially in black Africa. It is
said that in months preceding April 2012 he had prophesied that an octogenarian
President from Africa would pass on. I had not personally watched the prophecy
as I was no huge fan of the ‘man of God’. The news had reached me nevertheless.
The teleprophet was to apparently ‘clarify’
the prophecy, stating that the old man would certainly not be from West Africa.
It thus was to be the case that the search for the target of the divine
prediction turned Southwards. The most likely candidates were our old but big kahuna Bingu Wa Mutharika and Zimbabwe’s
comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe. And so in the months after the prophecy, intense
attention had turned to these 2 old men. Each and every public appearance was
scrutinized for tell-tale signs and each and every unexplained public absence was
fiercely speculated on. And so when I got the slightest inkling that the
prophecy might in fact have been fulfilled within our shores, I was
understandably….Well.
Anyway, as we
all know, it turned out that the President had indeed passed on or about April
5, 2012. After almost 2 days of posturing and astonishing scheming, the ruling
party accepted the inevitable. Bingu was declared dead and the hitherto side-lined
vice President ascended to the Presidency. She would become Africa’s second female
President and Southern Africa’s first. The political changes that followed then were
truly seismic. The DPP, rather harshly, realised that the throne on which it
had been perched in fact had marshmallow foundations. The collapse was spectacular.
Folks who though not holding any elected public office, had held considerable
sway over the tiny republic’s public affairs suddenly found themselves on the
peripheral. And concomitantly, those who had been in the unenviable despair of
political wilderness just a couple of hours before Bingu’s fall now revelled in
new found political glory. Wondering, rather zanily, how they could ever have
thought that they were staring at a cynical political cul-de-sac.
It’s been 2
years now since Bingu’s rather ignominious exit. And while his end was greeted with a euphoria
reserved for the very worst in our society, one gets the unnerving feeling that
time may just rehabilitate Bingu’s soiled legacy. Chipembere had a point when
he said that history takes long to deliver its verdict. For indeed, the
inherent contradiction in assessing the legacy of a departed President is that
to some significant extent, his greatness or smallness is inextricably linked
to the performance of those who follow him or her in office. For within 24
months after his passing, folks are asking if he really was as bad as their
feelings at his final hour had suggested. True he was one arrogant man, but
compared to the flip-flopping we have seen in our tiny republic’s administration
since his passing, his arrogance could almost pass for principle. Some of his
dreams for the country may have been too vivid even for the country own good,
but at least he had some vision that he
could articulate. Quite a far cry from
the pettiness and mundaneness that has now engulfed the Presidency. Bingu’s sometimes-resentment towards the West
and his whipping up of nationalistic sentiments appeared rather anachronistic
and desperate at times, one has to admit. But neither did he have the pitiful
naivety of believing that the West epitomised a benign and altruistic santa claus with bags and bags of
presents to dole out.
In the 2 years
that the son of Chisoka village eternally returned to his people, little has
changed for the common man. Public service delivery remains poor; from provision
of security to drugs in public hospitals. The refreshing promise to liberalise
the public airwaves has dissipated as swiftly as it was made. And the looting
from the public kitty has continued unabated. If you thought the days of unelected
and powerful patrons were over, you were dead wrong. What has conveniently
changed is the colour. The metamorphosis from blue to orange has closed with breath-taking speed. We sure
are rocking. But we are not making progress.
Far from it
for me to try to rehabilitate the legacy of the dead. But if truth be told, Bingu
eloquently makes the case for the law’s reticence in meting out the harshest of
penalties for those who fall foul of it. The vagaries of human behaviour indeed
make sense of the fiction that the
worst of offenders are not yet born. For just when you have sunk so low and you
are so fortified in your belief that there is no more sinking to endure, it’s
when someone drills even harder and lower. Somehow, just somehow, one gets the
feeling that we might have been too quick in writing the big kahuna’s obituary…
