BY BASHIR A BASHIR
When Martha heard Jesus was closing by, she rushed to welcome him there. Seconds after meeting Jesus, on the road, even before they greeted each other Martha asked a question “Lord what took you so long, if you were here before, Lazarus wouldn’t have died.”
Some, zimwalerized, would have said Martha should have waited for Jesus to rest, may be after akabalalika pamalirowa afunse. Little do they see that this question triggered Jesus to respond and raise Lazarus in no time. Right question at the right time. Malawians we must learn to ask right questions at the right time. If you lose your
relation who was on oxygen but electricity went off, learn to ask why when the hospital has a genset standby. It could be someone pocketed money for fuel, lives are lost, they are not moved.
Roads authority stood on air to say the reason they installed toll gates was to ensure immediate maintenance of M1. Now Blantyre-Lilongwe stretch is full of dangerous potholes. Motorists are damaging tyres daily, some leading to accidents, but none is asking where is the money toll gates are making going?
Brian Banda asked the minister of defence for choppers at the onset of the cyclone, his answer was the weather, our choppers can’t fly. It was a bitting seeing people dying desperately. If there was a chopper then, lives wouldn’t have been lost. Later, the atmosphere clears up, some Malawians are still stranded 4 good days later, no sane mind would have missed the question “where are our choppers to save the remaining survivors.” It is zokumwa madzi ometera ndevu who find this question out of line. Those lives to be saved mean nothing. None should ask such a question. Let them die until our neighbors come in. Even those provided by neighbors are not enough to cover Mulanje, Chiradzulu, Thyolo, Phalombe, Zomba, Machinga and Mangochi at the same time. We still need more choppers. Where are our choppers? That is the danger of being led by zimwalerized society. Blank slates.
Even now, we saw the advice Chilima made to city council to vacate illegal settlers on soche mountain. If we had followed this advice, some lives could have been saved. It all means Chilima is skilled in this field of disaster management and we saw how promptly he handled disaster matters. In Karonga when the bridge was flushed away, he was there in hours, the bridge was restored in hours too. This is the person we must have trusted to lead on disasters. We are asking the president, where is Chilima, the president needs Chilima to lead him?
