Malawi: No Wine in the Warm Cana of Africa

BY JAMES CHAVULA

When I hear the Minister of Lipstick and Lip Service on radio, I am often struck by images of a primary school teacher likely to cheat—not teach— pupils that the adjective of walk is ‘walkative’. 

With a legacy of broken sentences and misplaced phrases, the loud minister accords grammar students and teachers fast-forward examples of what not to do in the queen’s language.

MIRRORS AND SILVER SCREEN -by Vic Kasinja, BNL

 If you encounter her on what is supposed to be the television station for the nation, you will think she spends all her time standing before the mirror and embalming herself with make-up where she can do with less and less.

She may require more time with grammar books than glamour and looks, but her quotations in newspapers show that not all her leisure time is wasted by things of the world.

While you blame the appointing authority for making such a primary school teacher head of the lip service department at the expense of more proven and University-certified orators at his disposal, the lipstick mouth has learned to recite the word of God and it appears it is time she got a bachelors of divinities degree for all wrong reasons.

TALK OF WEDDINGS AND CANA  -by getty/afp 

In the newfound collar, the lip servant of the dirty game recently dared ministers of the word to stop writing pastoral letters and start offering solutions to plagues in this Egypt in dire need of a better Moses.

Behold the minister of lip service said unto God’s servants who are yet to get the K1 million her boss promised: “We expect them (the clergy) to understand the Bible better.  When Jesus Christ went to a wedding at Cana and was told that there no wine, he did not write a pastoral letter. [However] he turned water into wine.”

Being a busy bee when it comes to refuting this and spinning that, the lipstick minister should be commended for holding steadfast to the holy book up to what is generally accepted as Jesus’ first miracle. However, reading on could have been more enlightening.

MORE WINE AT CANA -photo:wikipictures 

In her analogy, the biblical Cana is what used to be the Warm Heart of Africa. Therefore, the empty wine skins constitute sugarless shops, drug-denied hospitals, empty fuel pumps, forex-strapped government and any service station where you queue for nothing at the end of the long wait.

However, the reprimanded ministers of the word are no Jesus in this land of empty skins. Like citizens stand in line for everything, they have not forgotten bracing the sun to elect a jesus whose duty is first and foremost to ensure constant supply of basic needs.

By writing the letters, the ministers of the Word are only calling on the chosen one not only to start keeping promises, but also acting on well-chronicled problems which have become highlights of dialogue for more talk than action.

Although the warm-hearted people seem to know their jesus and continue investing their faith in him at a time wine skins are getting drastically dry, he is either rude or surrounded by lips that are twice as much 

that the masses would get insults for answers if they squarely confronted him with empty skins that he ought to see and fill by powers vested in him.

Forexwards, the mortal jesus and his lip service department would not hesitate to blame the devil East or West for licking the dollar, euros, rands, pulas and shillings from his central bank’s vaults.

Amid murmurs of fuel shortage, the department cannot just stomach those stuck in dry pump stations to continue tarnishing the holy name of their wise and dynamic jesus.  As it has always been, plans are underway to build petroleum reservoirs which will halt the problem forever and ever more.

But ask not whether it is wise or dynamic for the hungry to build silos when they cannot afford a plateful of grain, but what the lips at your service would say if you complained about sugar scarcity.

“Behold,” she would rant, “verily, verily, the scarcity and rising prices are a blessing in disguise because medical surveys shows people are dying because they don’t know sugar is no sweet. It brings heart pressure, diabetes, high blood disease and kwashiorkor, blah blah blah!”

By the time you take the water you boiled for tea to the bathroom, you would have forgotten that when the Ngwazi in heaven said human kind shall not leave by bread alone, he did not mean you can live without sugar when you have money and hunger for it.

In the end, you can only imagine what this jesus would have said if they told him there was no wine at the wedding. Go to hell? Stupid? Colonial puppets? Satan is on our backs?

Your guess may not be as good as mine, but his lip service team would surely hasten to remind the best man, chief marshal and organising committee that the scarcity of wine does not affect the guests from the village.

On a lighter note, who would have the temerity to tell the militant spokespersons of jesus that even the people who gulp gallons of home-made gin deserve festive wine once in a while?

Maybe the lipstick minister’s master is just jesus Matiki or no Jesus at all. Maybe the clergy and other letter-writing activists are the way, the torch and the light.

That way, the lipstick minister and his team should stop living in denial and learn to oblige when emerging jesuses tell them to fill the skins with water—for with acceptance and faith, impossibilities are miracles.

One can only wish the Minister of Lipstick and the Lip Service rose from pompous slumber while the empty wine skins still have the potential to become wells of fuel, vaults of forex and bales of granulated sugar.

But it is not every one’s tongue that is both a pastor and a politician. And a tongue so loud and mischievous breeds a marvelous villain.