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I think MPs should go to school

12/11/2009 00:00:00 The Editor

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Sir,

When will Swazis regard our land as the father and mother of everybody living on it? The gods of the land may be angry and crying over one way wardness of Swaziland.

We keep changing governments, jobs, relationships, churches or other external things – hoping each change will settle the confusion or fill the emptiness in our hearts. That is life by the way. We always think this time it will be different but it does not. As I see it, we lack focus and vision.

Swaziland has all the resources, human and material to be great, yet chooses not to be. Why has our case been like this? Is it in our stars or character, our attitude may be? Why have successive politicians failed the nation and its citizens? Thank goodness they can now admit that it is the love of money, they cannot even concentrate because they are broke? The economic downswing is swinging around them.

Our MPs have a function in this country. They are supposed to be the salt of the nation. Salt has many functions. In societies without refrigerators, salt is used as a preservative. It is rubbed onto meat to prevent decay, flavoured into foods to taste better. But to be effective salt must be in contact with the food. Salt, when left a fraction of an inch away from food, can neither preserve or flavour.

MPs must function as salt by intermingling with the people. Although they don’t realise it, their daily lives moderate the people and society around them, as they live their daily lives, flavour one society through the little kindness they should show, the humility they should demonstrate and so on.

Salt changes things so it should be with their lives around us. It influences flavours, attitudes and actions of those it comes in contact with. Influence of course can be bad or good. Salt is excellent, but if it goes flat, it is useless, good for nothing. Salt is salt. Without saltiness, it is not salt.

MPs you deny the salt function when you fail to mix with the nation’s needs, when you segregate from that which needs preserving when you are less than loving and kind. You deny the salt function when you put your beatitudes and when you do these things, you have lost saltiness because you are no longer salt.

Chinua Achebe’s colonialist text in ‘Things Fall Apart’ is now apt in describing the state of our nation. It is now that things have really started to fall apart in Swaziland. Everyday happening in Swaziland tends to justify the themes of some of the novels, plays which have long died in us and all of us have become causalities of our dance in the forest amid paths of thunder.
Everything in our land is so scattered that the centre can no longer hold. Look at the people we voted for, behaving like school children. We need to face it. We need to admit it. These people are impressive workers, nothing more. Look at the list of their accomplishments. They have done it all and all in our name. Our worry is aggravated by the fact that people who should call them to order are busy tweedling their thumbs by saying nothing.

At no other time in the history of Swaziland is the nation found in greater difficulties and challenges than now, most especially in the face of dwindling economic fortunes, failing moral values, crumbling social securities such as qualitative education and living conditions, gainful employment, abundance of developmental activities amongst a few. Never.

I think the MPs should go to school. There, they will be taught management of human and material resources. Another course is how to be frugal with public money. Their major course will dwell on political ethics and morality, quest for power and its use.

Other courses should include the transparent nature of life and power, how to use public money to benefit the people. They should be taught political philosophy and it’s idea as enunciated by Plato. They should take courses on selfless service and how to keep away from corrupt and amassing of illegal wealth. They need to learn these things. Most of them don’t even know why there are there. They need to be made aware. There is no clarity of purpose what have they done thus far? Come on somebody.

Every sector you look, they still look pretty much like the kill –joy administration they succeeded. Sentiwani vele? One clear thing has come out of this, they have resorted to panic measures without sparing a thought about the welfare of the people they serve.

The latest of this panic not-well-thought-out-measure is the recent outcry about the love of money. They should be taught about what they should do when such things happen.
Their ignorance is shamful, if indeed they were not part of a plot to shout for a raise in style. Such outrageous behaviour from our MPs, the same old trouble, where are we going? Where are the Lincolns then? The Moses, the Elijah? Baphi?

By Collen Matsebula