Reading Time: 3 minutes“Poverty is a crime….. some of the poor black brothers suffer all the time…..” – Andrew Tosh, 1988. While the sentiments expressed by the son of reggae legend, Peter Tosh, give some insights into the universal problem of poverty, this columnist would describe it as more than a crime. It is a curse. It is

Reading Time: 3 minutesVisiting the genocide memorial centre in Kigali, Rwanda, is as sobering as it is harrowing and debilitating. The centre graphically chronicles the genesis, the execution and the aftermath of what is perhaps the bloodiest holocaust in modern times, with such succinctness that the patrons are left wondering how human beings can act so hideously against

Reading Time: 3 minutesTomorrow is New Year’s Day, marking the beginning of a fresh year. Come midnight tonight, we shall kiss goodbye to 2023 and forever consign it to history. There will be ululations, noise making, fire cracking and all manner of audible celebrations to mark the passing of one year and the beginning of another. What is

Reading Time: 3 minutesTomorrow is this year’s Christmas Day. It is a day on which adherents to the Christian faith all over the world commemorate the birth of a very special individual: Jesus of Nazareth. Quoting Isaiah 7:14, the Gospel writer, Matthew, mentions that Mary’s son would be called Emmanuel. He says in Matthew 1: 22 – 23,

Reading Time: 3 minutes“….kumene bambo ake, pansi pa mgodi, anali kuswa miyala ndi msana waonso,” goes the last line of the first stanza of a Chichewa poem in a Standard 3 book of the 1960s and 1970s. The book’s title was Liwiro. The poem was about a boy called Kandulo who was born to migrant Malawians in South

Reading Time: 3 minutesWhen we talk about corruption and other vices that bedevil our nation, we just think in terms of the civil service. It is like the public officers are really dirty and everybody else is clean. The media, especially, cannot be partakers in corruption or other acts of lawlessness, it is generally believed. Nothing can be

Reading Time: 3 minutesAt a recent burial ceremony of a senior pastor, unexpected drama erupted. As the director of programs was busy calling out names of people to lay their wreaths on the grave, another funeral procession arrived and got seated next to an open grave about 50 metres away from the site of the funeral that was

Reading Time: 3 minutesWe had the opportunity to reflect on some of the developments that have taken place in this country since independence, last week. Quite impressive, I must say, but certainly not as much as one would have liked to see to realistically drill a dent into the poverty and misery Malawians face. Any GDP growth rate

Reading Time: 3 minutesThe opening line of a certain poem goes something like this: Two prisoners looked through the bars; One saw mud and other, stars. The same reality was interpreted differently, depending on each one’s attitudes. In the one case, the observer had a positive attitude and looked for something positive in the reality before him. He