By Wesley Macheso
First, you must build a tombstone so huge that it costs K2.7 billion. Those who think that amount is too ridiculous for a place of death don’t know what they are talking about.
Call that tombstone a mausoleum or any other fancy English name whose inscrutability can justify lavish and reckless expenditure of taxpayers’ money.
That thing has to be grand for under it will be buried over 20 million people, together with their dreams and any aspiration they had for future generations. When they realise that, they will get the sense of it.
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I said this before, and I will repeat it a million times if need be: don’t mind any naysayers trying to distract you from this project.
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After all, this will not be the first burial site in this godforsaken country. Leaders before you have buried them before. Isn’t it how your kind survives–by finding ways of siphoning as much money as possible from them so that they come to their knees, crawling before your eminence, begging?
This is how you maintain power by keeping them poor so that they remain servile–tied to the leash of your grace. You must choose poverty for them so that they admire and revere your polished face when you show up to appreciate how hunger is devastating their communities.
By spending K2.7 billion on a graveyard, some may think that you have forgotten that the country is facing a threat of hunger following the drought and floods last year.
Nature has jokes, doesn’t it? Drought and floods in the same year! Was it the gods trying to mock your government–telling you that you are not wise enough to harvest some water and redirect it to irrigation? Maybe that would have demanded a few billions of Kwacha? But we know you would rather use those for more important things like building tombstones for fallen politicians.
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Well, why not? You would be happy to see another visionary leader build something like that for you when you are gone. That is the only legacy politicians leave in your country–graveyards.
Please don’t mind them when they are alarmed that your government has money to waste on the dead instead of trying to save the dying that still have breath. You should not spend these precious and scarce resources on useless things like hospitals.
These people are used to dying. Do you think they expect anything positive when they go to public hospitals? These are places of death, and you can tell from the faces of the people lying on the floor and sleeping under broken hospital beds, that they have already given up. They are the wretched of the earth and they know that your job is to keep them as such.
Don’t even think of investing your dying currency on education. These people must remain ignorant and illiterate so that they don’t challenge you.
When you are burying a country, make sure that you always save your face. You should be able to travel across the desolate land while the citizens cannot because there is no fuel to fill their second-hand vehicles with. You alone, and your big men and women on the entourage should have access to that resource.
You alone have all the power, so make sure that when you are going to the Southern Region, fuel tankers head in the same direction. That way, you will avoid angry motorists and stranded commuters pelting your very expensive cars—that you bought with their taxes—with insults and stones.
It is quite easy to get away with murder and bury a people, big man. All you need to do is not to care about anyone else. Leadership in a country like yours has always been about selfish interests.
When you are in power, make sure that you eat as much as possible, and divert as many resources as possible for useless projects–you may need the same for your campaign. Those who are surprised with what is going on have not read enough (keep them illiterate, remember?).
They do not know that the beautiful ones are not yet born. Maybe those who are supposed to save this country are somewhere busy watching English football, drinking to run away from their reality. That is how you bury a country.
