Moya,

Once again, it is that time and that season of the year when we must fulfil your order, edict and commandment made one week in March 2015 before your departure for the place of no return.

Moya, like a plaque in a hotel your order stands in our heart of hearts. In short, you commanded that we shall, without fail, give you, annually, an unfettered, unembellished, and unadulterated state of our estate report or suffer the consequences of your wrath.

Indeed, Moya, for seven straight years, we have dutifully stuck to the promise and given the reports for fear that you may indeed execute your threat to come back to earth and hold us by our necks until we chock unto untimely death.

Moya, please receive greetings from your biological sons and their biological output. You will be pleased to hear that like the numbers of many families in this estate, your earthly family is growing, something the Catholic bishops appear now to be against.

Moya, growing also is the number of your non-biological offspring, the children you loved most and spent all your adult life bringing up. This estate now boasts over two thousand well-trained and courageous crusading assegai-drawn male and female journalists.

Moya, we understand that it takes a long time, some even threaten us that it takes a thousand light years, to reach where you abode. We trust and believe you have received the new arrivals well and are now cogitating and evaluating your earthly escapades with likes of Grey James Mang’anda, who packed his bags to join you last August, Uncle Dick Milanzie, who retired last December from earthly nonsense to be in the promised land of milk and honey, no alcohol, and music.

We understand you are planning to launch a publication, the Heaven Times, with you and Mang’anda as co-editors, Cheulekeni Mita, Tony Mita, Patrick Semphere, Dingi Chirwa, Chinyeke Tembo, and many other colleagues as reporters and the great Uncle Dick as the head of photography and page design. We can only imagine how boisterous the editorial meetings will be.

Moya, you may recall that our parliament building was built by the Chinese some 12 or 13 earthly years ago. Since then our members of parliament, in government and opposition, have been sitting phwii, seating, eating, raising the salaries and allowances controlling allocations of money in that building.

Shockingly, Moya, the people’s representatives could not and did not think about allocating some money to the maintenance of their own house, their own source of power and money. Guess who repaired the parliament? The same Chinese who built it. They used as little money as one tenth of what Moya de Kapoloma is alleged to have personalized.

Moya, the Ukraine/NATO– Russia/Iran war rages on and it has produced interesting outcomes. Russia has donated 20 thousand of tonnes of fertilisers to Malawi and the boy from Kasiya has been invited to attend the Africa-Russia summit in St Petersburg. If he refuses to go, we Kamuzuan pragmatists, will go. Not to be outsmarted, Ukraine has appointed our former President Ama Dr Joyce Banda as its Grain Ambassador in Africa. Grain Ambassador? Yes, Moya, Grain Ambassador.

Moya, here in the estate that you loved most, strange and funny things are still happening at an alarming rate. You were not here when the boy from Kasiya and his running mate, the Mangonian Impi, convinced us that if we voted for them, all those who had stolen from the estate’s coffers, past and present, would face that metallic music called Maula, where one former minister is languishing for accepting and using stolen government property.

Moya, the boy from Kasiya appointed a youngish female lawyer to champion his administration’s jihad to rid this estate of corruption, kusolola. Then, there came Cyclone Batatawala and Cyclone Sattar. Big names; small names; non-names started falling one by one. When the net started getting too close to the centre of real power, the youngish lawyer herself became a target. She was whisked away at dawn; released; regally forgiven; then charged with this and that case. An attempt to bribe her out of the job she was interviewed for failed and so her harassment continues.

That this estate will one day defeat corruption is like emptying the Pacific Ocean with a tea-cup, kulemba m’madzi. Ours is an estate where those who earnestly fight corruption are fought by the very people that claim, verbally, to fight corruption. Those who earnestly fight those who earnestly fight corruption get promoted in the civil service.

Confusing? Yes, Moya, and that is the state of our estate eight years on.

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