The Philosophies of an Unemployed Graduate

Another Friday!

It feels good to come back to the keypad to write something having received some good feedback from the previous write. We all love some positive comments, do we not?

On with today’s cry for help…

If you are the sort of person who hardly takes anything seriously like me, this is probably the best time to be a Malawian. People who sleep, eat and dream politics are in full elections mode  as we are counting months to the tripartite elections. Good stuff.

You do not need to be a keen follower for you to notice that there is some serious tension in the political atmosphere. With the country’s number two pulling crowds in all the regions and preaching the message of change, his boss could not help it but counter-argue some of his hottest points. I could have talked about the high-speed trains here but I guess people have already spent much time on schooling each other (and their president) on that one. The one that I will talk about here is that of the “1 million jobs”.

In case you are one human who lives under some rock with no connection to the outside world, our vice president who also happens to be a presidential aspirant has promised to create 1 million jobs for the youth who are languishing in unemployment. His boss, who is the current president, however has dismissed the whole thing as being overly ambitious and impossible. Ma biggy kutsutsanatu, eti?

To be honest, I am not too sure as to who to believe between the two people. On the VP’s part, he has gone on to defend himself and say that if there are people who do not know how to create jobs by the seven figures margin, they should sit on the stands and watch him do it. If you think of it, he might have a good point. After all, there are a lot of potential areas of job creation in this country and those could easily be exploited. On the other hand, looking at the magnitude of the task at hand and the timeline, I am inclined to believe that APM might just be right. I mean… Ndi 1 million tikukambayitu apa. Anyways. I might just be a pessimist in this. I should probably keep my mouth shut and pen in the pocket on this one.

Having heard about this promise of a million jobs, I found myself in a chat where me and a bunch of friends were analyzing the plausibility of creating such a number of jobs. One clever guy pointed out that the fact that we have issues with electricity, housing and road networks means that there is an almost infinite job market in Malawi. That brought in a big question from me and my fellow unemployed chap who were in this chat with the clever white collar employee; What kind of jobs are these? Are they jobs for people who spent a good four to six years in the corridors of some university or are they for a person with the biggest muscle in town? I qualify in both ends, anyway but that is beside the point; point being that the quality of the jobs also matters.

Having finished my clinical internships at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, I have had a taste of unemployment and realized how much of a frustration it can be to be unemployed when you have your papers gathering dust at home. That is the main reason I raised the issue of the quality of jobs that young people in this country need.

Once in a while, I find myself chatting with friends most of whom are graduates. In such casual chats, it is not a very unusual thing for me to pose a question of whether the life they are living is the one they dreamt of five years prior to the present day. The question attracts a diverse range of answers but the interesting thing is that most admit that they are not yet living the good life they fantasized years back. Slow progress or something of the sort.  Most of these people point out the lack of a smooth transition from college education to the industry as the reason they do not get into the dream life as quickly as they want to.

In the utopian world we live as innocent children, the normal human life (education/career) cycle entails that one launches himself from primary school into some decent secondary school before nicely proceeding to college and then landing on some government or private sector job. Nice and easy. No difficulties whatsoever. In the wake of the modern day, however, the stumbling blocks that lie along the way are just too many. Securing a place in a good secondary school is not much of an easy job and the capacity of the public universities is just too low. When you finally get out of the university with your degree, jobs are hard to come by even in the education and health sectors where having a job used to be a guarantee upon the completion of tertiary training. Pretty much not the case in the modern day.

We previously had one genius guest writer who told us that the way to navigate around job hunting is to be like a tree. He is yet to finish the two parts of the tripartite series and hopefully when he does we will all be like trees and nicely employed.

Perhaps we could also turn to the gospel of entrepreneurship that has been spreading like a wildfire over the years. I have seen it work for a good number of guys and I think it is worth a shot. If my memory serves me right, there is one minister who took this gospel a step further. When he was asked to preside over a nursing students’ graduation, he went on to challenge the graduands that they needed to take their eyes of the government as the provider of employment and explore entrepreneurship. These were nurses he was talking to and if you do not know nurses are in short supply in this country. Anyway. He might have been right from other perspectives that I cannot relate with.

Perhaps the best way of handling unemployment is the act of constantly making oneself better while continually exploring all the options on the shelf. Read. Learn. Volunteer.  For people of faith, this is one thing you “take to the LORD in prayer”. In line with the elections, we might as well vote for the person who is promising a lot of jobs and bank on the hope that he will deliver when he gets elected.

The Conversation

What an awesome Friday! It happened again last week. I ended up sleeping the whole day and the whole night thus failing to write something for the reader. You are probably used to the inconsistencies by now.

This morning I woke up worried about the possibility of the extinction of one of the things I love the most; a decent conversation; so I thought we might as well start a conversation about it.

It is a well-known fact that human interaction is essential for survival, pleasure and development at personal, community and global level. This is why there is so much effort put into such things as communication technologies with the same improving by the day. While we would expect these things to improve human interaction and connection to improve with these advances, however, there has been a constant decline in the same with human interaction getting more superficial, meaningless and unnecessarily complicated. Well. At least according to me.

You might have noticed that nowadays conversations about important issues have gotten extremely complicated because people usually take offences in situations where offences shouldn’t be taken. To some, being described as a short person is enough of a reason for throwing a tantrum which makes the use of adjectives for describing people an issue for some of us with limited vocabulary. We are not even allowed to talk about some things for the fear of sounding racist, sexist, extremist or derogatory and if things continue to be this way we might end up  being mute from not speaking; out of the fear of saying the wrong that. Now that is just wrong because it demeans the whole essence of plurality. I mean; what is the point of having 7 billion people freely roaming around if you can’t interact with a few hundred freely? Perhaps the only thing that we people forget is that offences are not given, but are rather taken just as one Trevor Noah likes to emphasize.

In the wake of the social media age, I found myself being excited about Facebook in my early college days. The moment I joined, I quickly got to make a lot of friends and within weeks I had over a half of a thousand Facebook friends. Then came the groups. I used to spend a good fraction of my time of the day reading what people had to say on different political, religious and dating forums on Facebook and the peak of it all came in the build up to the 2014 elections. Groups that were supposedly created with the aim of advancing national interests were awash with political campaign posts polite and derogatory alike. Fast forward to 2018 I am a graduate who happens to have expanded his circle and is lingering in Whatsapp groups along with far more educated and senior people in society. The year prior to elections is offering the same hype as that of 2014 (and more) and the presence of more convenient apps for sharing news and propaganda was ideally supposed to make such discussions exciting. Guess what? It is not. People are getting intolerant by the day and they get to vex at the most benign of contrary opinions. Outside of political discussions, things are not so different, With people getting so soft and easily triggered, conversation, a thing that was supposed to flourish is now facing the danger of extinction.

If you could not relate with that because you have not interacted with people who go poaching for someone who can offend them, here is another angle to it. In relationships and marriage, people are supposed to have good and honest conversations as they embark on the journey of constantly building up their relationships. Rather interestingly, the art (or science) of having a conversation in a relationship or in marriage is becoming a rare thing on its own. I know that there are people who are reading this and thinking of playing the “look at who is talking card” but my fair share of dating life (which lasted well over two years; and I have it on my CV) is that good communication leads to a good relationship. In relations to the article we wrote on post-mortem Friday about relationships failing because of sex and lack of preparation, here is the other thing that is fuelling the fracas. Perhaps people are subscribing to the Chris Rock’s Tambourine (if you haven’t watched this, you should) philosophy that relationships should hinge on having lots of sex and going places, in which case good conversations and deep emotional connection are playing very little. We have relationships in which the only thing partners talk about is how the other is doing, what they have eaten, how much the other needs and their weekends will go; with no interest whatsoever in the inner well-being of the partner. I find that too superficial for my liking and not worth my time. Attention seeker? Baby? Maybe. But as people build up towards relationships and marriage, it is necessary that the conversations go beyond high definition pictures and pizza.

Then there is this thing of communication in the family; parents and children and between siblings. It is funny how limitations of tradition hinder conversations between parents and children and in between siblings. On one crazy night (probably too stressed up and under influence) I remember calling my mum and asking her why she hadn’t called me in over a month and where she thought I was. What the whole situation taught me is that there is need for constant communication between parents and their children, however grown. The fact that I noticed a gap in this thing made me realize that there is a possibility that there are a whole bunch of sons and daughters who are not having good chats with parents. I do not have a whole lot of parents on my readers list but when you guys get there or if you are there, you better be the parents our generation never had; those who can be a safe haven for their own children and those who can have a decent chat with them.

We could add the dimension of conversations between religious leaders and their judgmental tendencies towards followers and how we need to get rid of that (moni azibusa nonse) but that would push the article beyond the recommended word limit. All in all, we need to have good conversations in every setting. Ever realized that prayer is some form of conversation too, anthu opemphera inu? Even God wants a good chat with His own. Having said that, I will say this again. We all need good conversations in which we can call a spade by its name without triggers. In relationships, conversations need to aim at building deep connection between spouses by going beyond the basics.

By the way… Who of you people stays in Zomba? Let us meet at the Botanic Gardens for the reception of the wedding of one of Richie Online’s religious followers, Sir Peter Yakobe.

Have a lovely weekend.

Post-mortem Friday

Woza Friday!

Apologies for last week. I actually have no explanation or excuse for not posting something on that day. Perhaps people should start paying for articles on Airtel Money or TNM Mpamba to keep me motivated. Either way. Pepani. It won’t happen again. I hope.

Having interacted with a lot of people over the past two days, I was bombarded with a lot of ideas on what to write about on this particular day. Two of them, however, struck me and when it came to drafting this article, I quickly turned to the two conversations and jumped on the keypad.

If you are not in a happy relationship, you probably have noticed that there is some sort of war or blame game on why the longevity of many relationships is not that impressive and why many people are not happy in their relationships. Men blame it on women and women point their blaming fingers to men. Well. One good lady friend of mine had an answer to that and it came in the form of a picture status on WhatsApp. The picture status was an anonymous quote which stipulated that so long as men do not open up to their women about the demons they are struggling with; love is going to remain a temporary emotion. Those are not the exact words but that was the message. Iyiyi tiisiye kaye pomwepa for now.

Earlier today, when I posted flyers of tomorrow’s events (three engagements and a wedding), I got under a heavy barrage of judgmental questions on when I was going to stop posting about friends’ weddings and do my own. My response to one of those who were asking the “not-so-clever” question (at Richie Online we try to avoid the word stupid when we are not talking politics) was a simple reflection of the question to the one who posed it. To back myself up, I used the fact that he is in a relationship and I am not, which makes that particular human a better candidate to answer the question than I am. The response? “That one is not marriage material and I will soon be single.”

You now know where this is going, don’t you?

The “not marriage material” response to my question triggered memories of the initial conversation. When I had seen the post about love being a temporary emotion, I engaged the young lady and asked her whether she thought that was what was wrong with modern day relationships. We spiraled into a long post-mortem on zibwenzi zanu zinatha zija. That is what I want to share now. Relax and take notes, because this article is the Richie Online version of that post-mortem.

Rather related to the “not marriage material” response was the fact that people do not take much time to get to know each other before falling head first in love (or whatever that is, probably not love). We have a generation that has gotten into the habit of getting into what I call accelerated relationships. You meet a person today, get their number, text them all night for three days in a row and then arrange for a meeting. In this modern setting, someone can transform from a total stranger to bae in 9.2 days (on average). The 10^th day? Sex. People are getting to become other people’s baes without going through the process of becoming. In the end what happens is that people end up parting (not sure whether this qualifies as a breakup) on the promise that they discovered that their partner had some attributes that were not good. Avoidable, right? Yes and no.

One could argue that giving things a bit of time could solve this issue while some would say that people are good at hiding their character. Muona kuti mupanga bwanji. Izizi mupanga conclude nokha.

Did I mention sex in the other paragraph? Yeah. That is the other thing that is leading to some of these untimely deaths of relationships. Here is the thing. Sex is a very complex thing; so complex so that in one of his lectures, one Dr Chiwoza Bandawe once told our class that sex is very emotional, spiritual, psychological and political. Having reflected upon that line over the years, I have gotten to appreciate the fact that the main point behind it is that whatever sexual activity one does affects pretty much every aspect of their life… for a long time. This is probably why most cultures and spiritual grouping advocate for the confinement of sex in marital union. It’s probably less damaging that way.

The simple psychology of sex (according to one Chris Rock) is that whenever a man and a woman meet and click, they almost always have the ultimate go of getting at it. That is Chris Rock. If we are to assume  that he is right, process that is considered normal is that of getting to know each other, dating and getting into a matrimonial union before doing it; then… Ultimate goal achieved. In the later day, however, people get to the ultimate goal on day 10 after knowing each other on day zero. In line with the psychology, people get satisfied and have no reason for fighting on through their disagreements and differences. Boom! Breakup. The other funny thing about sex is that it is easy to refrain from it when you haven’t tasted the fruit. What happens in the end is that we create a downward spiral in which when one relationship ends because of sex, we go into another without that fear of replicating the situation. Here is where the concept of matrimonial union becomes interesting. If you get there without tasting the fruit, whatever happens after you do it doesn't matter much because you are confined to that unbreakable union. At least on paper.  

There you go. I just broke it down for you.

It really got to me when I got to realize that some people think that the modern day relationship problem lies in the fact that men do not open up about the demons they struggle with. I would like to believe that it is not only men who have skeletons in their closets, although I would say that in my own experiences and observations it is men, more than women, who have this problem. The issue is just that it gets hard to open up when you anticipate a reaction that is not favorable. I, for example have my own issues, and if I am to open up, I would want to open up to a mature person who would help me up, other than one who would judge me thus throwing me deep in my issues and making me lose hope for a positive change. Perhaps we all have to learn to listen if others are to open up to us. Mwina dzikoli can change for the better, abale ndi alongo.

At the end of it all, the point of this is that we need to get to know our spouses better at every stage of the journey before proceeding to the next one. The other point? Intimacy should come after commitment. Izi za wadya balalikani izi is damaging our society.

Ndanena ndanena!