Why we Malawians are corrupt

Those of you who are bald, what do you apply on your bald patches? Surely not hair oil. Face cream, perhaps? Body lotion, maybe? 

I wouldn't know because my problem is quite different. 

A good friend of mine keeps reminding me that life’s got a wicked liking for serving curved balls. One of mine is having a grey mop when my brother, who’s all of six years older, still sports black hair. Mind you, this is many years after mine was prematurely deserted by melanin.

Imagine!

By the way, I'm not alone. Many of my friends would also be ‘unproud’ owners of professorial greys were it not for some bottled or tubed help. But, would you believe it, they have the temerity to tease me about my greys! What cheek! I get my own back, though, by reminding them that were they to get long hospital admissions, they wouldn't be getting any visitors. You see, after a while, the veneer of black would disappear and their mops would default to grey. So potential visitors would be passing by their beds without stopping and would leave the hospital assuming the patients they had intended to visit had been discharged.

Incidentally, these days I religiously trim my hair to the scalp. Not that I’ve a head shaped for bald styles. But eh, it’s either that or greyness in its full glory.

If only the Malawi government were as religious in trimming corruption … [sigh]

Yes, corruption is the malignant cancer that permeates every facet of Malawian society. If you want something, you’ve to cough up an extra amount on top of the legal fees. Birth certificates. Passports. Company registrations. Driving licenses. Plot of lands. Certificates of Fitness.

Yes, almost everything you can think of can be had but for a fee.

Sometimes I feel the government shouldn’t be paying the people who work in the departments responsible for producing these documents. These corrupt souls are self-employed. They don’t work for the government despite the salaries they get paid, do they? If anything, the government should be charging them rent for the furnished office space it provides them. As for the special stationery which is required for the issuance of the ‘papers’, these wretched souls called civil servants should be buying them from Government Print. 

Hey, they should be running their businesses without inputs, no?

By the way, for years I used to think poor salaries contributed to Malawi's culture of corruption. But I recently had a Eureka moment. It occurred to me in brilliant Technicolor that we’re nurtured into corruption very early in our childhoods.

I know your faces have now knit the question: ‘How?’

Well, let me explain. How do we coax children to eat food they don't like? Or bath? Or go to school on a particularly cold winter day. Indeed, how do we get kids to do any task that they aren’t particularly keen on? 

Yes, we bribe them with offers of treats!

If you bath, I’ll give you a candy. If you eat, I’ll let you watch Ben 10. If you go to school, I’ll buy you that toy you’ve been bothering me about. 

Always if this, then that. A whole series of bribes gets dangled before our children and before we know it, bribery becomes inculcated into their psyches as they morph into adults. They grow into adults who can’t do anything without an offer of a little something in return.