Who should text first? The age-old question.

Dear reader,

On a normal day like this, I would write an article and the opening would be something to do with the day being a Friday. I woke up feeling like the day was a Monday or something of the sort. The lack of activity on the busy area I overlook when I am out for a stretch on a normal midday makes it even more confusing as it is highly suggestive of today being a Sunday. Anyway. We are here and we can only wonder what day it is. I do not believe that we should name days based only on what the previous ones were, by the way.

It feels good to be back to writing ways. I have always told people who take interest in the person behind the Friday articles that writing is my way of venting out my anger and frustrations and that it is only through this way that I minimize the fallout and collateral damage. I sometimes feel what I would call a blend of pride and guilt when people tell me they have seen themselves in my articles when in essence I was just writing about myself the whole way. It gives me the sense that I have stepped on the raw nerves I strive to avoid but at the same time makes me realize that I am not alone in the darkness of my suffering.

Enough of the self-pity.

Coming back to writing ways was always going to be a difficult thing for me. Even in the thick of political and social media drama the choice of an article was going to be a difficult one for me. At the end of the day, I chose to write something about what most people in relationships are struggling with. The question?

“Who should text the other first?”

While I may agree with the one who is whining that this is a very stupid topic, I must say that this might be important for a few after all. By the time we get to the end of the second A4 page we should be able to determine the criteria by which we should choose who should text the other first in a relationship. Let’s break the ground.

I must state here that I do not have that much of relationship experience. My stint with these things lasted a little over two years and I have since taken a two year break from them. Not much of CV for someone who should be trying to answer this complex question, if you think about it but such a time provided a good opportunity to observe and experience some stuff.

The genesis and lifespan of a 21^st century relationship has evolved to an extent that most of the stages pass by in an accelerated. People meet and they exchange numbers. Before you know it, they get to be all over each other, texting through the night. In a matter of days, some premature relationship is born. The texting dynamics then keep getting poorer until the relationship dies a natural death. Needless to say, relationships are still good and everybody needs one. Well. Almost everyone (we will explain that in another article, koma enanu mukhoza kupitiriza kudya kanundu ndi kudumpha ma sipikala a Jai Banda).

On the texting dynamics, most of these relationships which involve semi-independent young humans are sustained by online communication and Whatsapp becomes vital in the communication because with time people have become too lazy to call. For some reason, the owner of this application decided that it was good for people to see when last the person on the other end of the line was online should they not be active in the moment. That is a good feature and it helps create realistic expectations in terms of response times. On the other hand, the same good feature has become a burden to some people in love as it creates questions. Imagine waking up a little after sunrise and not finding a good morning bae (or whatever you call each other) text from your spouse who was last seen online at 5:30. Hurts, right? You will not admit but we both know that this has been an issue mu chibwenzi chanucho. Even when there is no “last seen” involved, there have always been some issues that have restrained people from being the first texter in relationships in which spouses once put their school or career on the line because of spending too much time online.

There are several determinants of who texts first from my observations and experience. The first one of these (rather stupidly) is about who was the last to text. Some people just feel like if theirs was the last text on the chat, the other has to ignite the next chat with the first text. Of course it sounds logical, sometimes. The second? Whoever comes online first after the last chat. And then there is this thing of agreement. “Ukamaliza kupanga zakozo holla at me on Whatsapp.” Good stuff.

All those scenarios and things sound pretty simple but they have been sources of trouble for young relationships. People have had serious headaches on why their loved ones did not text them despite having been online at some point or despite them being the last to text and this has led to the collapse of some relationships. At some point, a game of egos has led people into thinking that they were not going to start a chat if bae was not going to.

I have swam a good number of miles in these waters and over years I have realized that these small internal barriers to communication have catastrophic effects on human interaction. .. and that these games are pretty unnecessary for someone who is serious about communication, in a relationship or otherwise. In my view, anyone who is really serious about interaction and the building of meaningful interpersonal relationships should not take sending the first text as a burden. It is just “Hi!”, anyway. The unnecessary pride we harbor and allow to flourish make the punching of these four keystrokes look like a herculean effort and at the end of the day we end of losing people of great value in our lives because we wanted to nourish our pride.

Having stated all that, I think we can go back to answering the question that troubles many every morning and evening (at the peak texting hours). Who should be the one to text first? Is it the one who last uploaded a funny picture for a status update? While that may be the nearest answer in the contexts of our pride hearts, the answer to all this lies in how much value we put to communication and whoever is on the receiving end of the communication. When we put so much value on the person on the other end, texting becomes easy regardless of the other factors that may be at play.

From the experience corner, I can say that such egos have cost me some potentially profitable relationships. From the observation corner, most relationships are suffering because of such trivial issues. I will not bring in suggestions or action points into this. All I will say is that if you are really serious about communication or your relationships, you will not need much contemplation to send the first text. For the rest of you, continue to act the way you act. Your relationship will take the natural course and eventually you won’t be needing to crack your head on whether you should send the first text, anyway.

Woza Friyay!

Homeland Insecurity

By the Venomous Hope


I do not remember the last article I wrote for the venerated Richie Online but it’s probably been some eternity. While on the bench, however, I have keenly enjoyed the writings of a number of scribes, including the host, dissecting various issues of national and personal importance. I have to confess that reading them has been more fulfilling than being harangued by the blog’s proprietor for missing the deadline. Writing this week has just reminded me how rusty I have become such that it took me hours to erase images of Wakanda from my brain and come to terms with today’s agenda.
For the starters, runaway TNM Super League leaders, Nyasa Big Bullets, struggled yesterday to dismiss from, FISD Challenge Cup, Zamani FC from Lizulu, a team composed of Irish potato farmers, plumbers and world-class kabaza operators. In fact, the team who are languishing in mid-table of the 8th division’s Bembeke League replied twice past the so-called People’s Team, and could have coughed up more if the referee was not afraid of losing his dental formula from irate Nyasa fans. This would have been inconceivable to Bullets under the legendary Kinnah Phiri. His coaching skills helped Bullets to reach the last 8 of the CAF Champions League in 2004 while sweeping the domestic title 8 years in a row. The few chronicled glory days of the Flames also coincided with the prime playing days of Kinnah who, since hanging up his boots in the early 90s, still hold the record for the number of goals scored for our beloved Flames by miles. And recently, he has become a hot potato to the extent that he himself thinks he can win any constituency in Nyasaland with a landslide.

Kinnah was one of the big wigs paraded by UTM in August in their Mzuzu launch and he endorsed Vice President Saulos Chilima for the 2019 general elections in a brief speech he made that day. Nonetheless, while positioning himself for a parliamentary seat this week, he has distanced himself from the UTM, and proclaimed to being a staunch DPP member since its infancy. We cannot berate his choice for political conscience but chopping and changing is one of the symptoms for our ailing politics. We all know Chenji Golo from Salima who has reinvented himself into DPP’s vice president for the Centre. Another Lower Shire lightweight, Salim Bagus, has just left MCP for the greener pastures of DPP this week barely months after being elected into the MCP’s inner circle. It becomes prickling for any party to lose the clout of members who pull crowds in political rallies especially with the May 2019 elections fast approaching. The mass exodus of previously diehard supporters including the likes of Chilima, Patricia Kaliati, Richard Msowoya, Noel Masangwi, and Lucius Banda, among others, from both DPP and MCP cannot be understated for the mere fact that politics is a game of numbers. DPP obviously is bleeding more than the others because of the caliber of noisemakers it has lost while MCP will be reeling from the realization that it will be twice harder to convince Malawians of the evils of DPP now that UTM is also preaching the same gospel. Parties will end up hiring own Balaam’s to curse opponents before the D-day.

Talking about seers, in May 2017, Afrobarometer survey revealed that 32% of respondents will usher MCP to victory if elections were held during that period while 27% chose DPP, 11% UDF, and 9% PP. Afrobarometer is composed of some elite university professors including Edge Kanyongolo and Happy Kayuni. Just a month earlier of the release of this report, UK-based Economic Intelligence Unit prophesied that Peter Mutharika was on course to retain tenancy at Sanjika because of the ‘exceptional performance he had shown.’ And just last week, Boniface Dulani’s Institute of Public Opinion and Research (IPOR) delivered an oracle that favors Mutharika’s DPP to narrowly scrape past MCP with 27% of respondents choosing DPP while 24% opting for Chakwera. UTM polled 16% despite that it had only clocked a month by the time the survey was conducted.
The fact that no party is convincing enough to get more than 35% of the projected votes is alarming for the country with majority citizens swimming in the deep waters of poverty. It is an indication of how confused voters are especially with regard to the issues politicians present to them. The manifesto of a Malawian political party is just a carbon copy of another; you can only be convinced of the original creators if you personally benefit from such a party. It is the reason the likes of Kinnah Phiri do not find it difficult to associate themselves with the flicking candle light yesterday and trek to four maize cobs the next day. There’s no underlying ideology to distinguishing utterances of a Congress youth to innuendos of a DDP cadet. It is the reason we have countless registered political parties including my own PETRA which will resurface in January after a four and half years of hibernation. Friday Jumbe owns New Republican Party, aimanso. Perhaps we needed that 50+1 bill to have a winner guaranteed by a majority of votes and forge strong alliances, not headlines like “Cassim Chilumpha’s Assembly for Democracy and Development (ADD) negotiating a cordiale with bed-gate mastermind Khumbo Kachali’s Freedom Party. Well these two spent forces were once vice presidents, we should always remember.

And the current vice president has been omitted from the latest list of cabinet ministers in the Wednesday’s reshuffle by Mutharika. A lot of whining is already underway and every monger with access to media platform is expressing his or her views on what they’re calling ‘constitutional crisis.’ The Malawi Law Society has described the cabinet as illegal because it does not recognize the membership of the vice president while the state house is saying it does not need to mention the vice president’s membership as it is by default, as if they will invite him to any meeting. The usual loudmouths of the civil societies, however, have written the UN for it to sack Mutharika from his role as He-for-she Champion, whatever it is, because he has reduced the number of female ministers from respectable 4 to 3 in a 21-member squad of DPP loyalists. The newly refurbished Ministry of Homeland Security has also left tongues waging ranging from the new name to the characters in its office. It is now led by Nicholas Dausi, the same guy who failed to explain what 4G is while enjoying his previous job as ICT minister, and crucially he is deputized by the enigmatic Charles Mchacha. Anna Kachikho from Phalombe was sacked while UDF President who sometimes plies his political trader under the banner of Agenda for Change has retained his portfolio as the overall boss of this blog’s landlord.

Like all reshuffles nearer to elections, Mutharika is surely thinking about a winning team, and roping in Mchacha is a way of surrounding himself with the most trusted lieutenants so that he is not stubbed in the back when he looks the other way. We can only speculate as to what the combination of Dausi and Mchacha will bring to the table in regard to their control of the already corrupt Malawi Police Service. Are they going to dissuade police intimidation of supporters of other parties when the heat becomes hell fire? Let’s hope our fears are mere nightmares. All in all, the cabinet shows the president’s political homeland is insecure. The holes of his maladministration need people who can deep their hands in dirty to fix. He will need people renowned with foul mouths to exert pressure on his enemies and saintly uplift the DPP to paradise. It will be war in the run up to elections, and merely changing the name of ministry will not help its cause. What do I think of the UTM? Well just look at its leadership and what they stand for. The likes of Kaliati can join forces with the devil if their lives depend on it. As is the trend among all parties, UTM attracted a host of disgruntled politicians whose only agenda was to continue stealing from Malawians. With Chilima at the helm perhaps they have solace of preaching change but for how long? We will never run away from thieves plundering our resources.

Enjoy your weekend folks.

One on English: a Letter from the Daydreamer

Dear Richie,

I hope you are alive. Like every other Friday, I was anticipating your usual text announcing that you have published another article. Quite a feat for a medical doctor, I must say. Some of us whose bread is 'won' in related fields our pens are becoming dusty. Not that we do not have ideas to write about, but this 'bread winning' game is taking most of our precious time, leaving us completely battered that the pen is too heavy to lift. From past experience, I could tell it's either that your sorry gadget was misbehaving, or today's 'doctoring' could not let you have time to tell us one of those random thoughts playing gendaball in your mind (there is a new game in town, gendaball, invented by Malawians. I am hoping maybe this one we can be world number one, after all it's our own creation. But we'll talk about that another day).

If I didn't know you that personally, I could have thought wagoba mafulasi after getting your MSCE results. I could have understood you, most people are very frustrated right now. For the first time since I started following these things, there is no one who has scored 6 points. The examination administration gurus have told us that, in summary, this is as a result of poor performance in English.

Personally, this is no surprise to me. We keep claiming that English is not the measure of one's intelligence. Now look at the MSCE situation. No one has 6 straight points because no one scored a 1 in each and every subject including English. Those who did, the highest they got was probably a 2. At least it has shown that it is a measure of something, probably not necessarily intelligence.

For a long time, I have been observing the trends the Queen's language is going through. I suppose you have heard about, or even chanced one or two people who did not go beyond the old time's Standard 6. If you compare those people and how a Form 4 student of these days writes or speaks English, you would really appreciate how much the graph has tipped.

These days you find even a graduate who can barely speak two consecutive sentences in English without scampering for extra vocabulary. Many of us sound like that guy who calls himself Mr Broken English. I find it a lame excuse when people say English is not a measure of one's intelligence. Whether it is a measure or not, it is not reason enough to run away from learning it properly and mastering it.
In my line of duty, I often become a fly on the wall in different gatherings. Just this week I found myself in a very high profile gathering where one of the participants was also lamenting about deteriorating levels of English. This lady, a former academician herself, was challenging fellow academicians to take deliberate efforts in ensuring that the teaching and learning of English is resuscitated.

This got me thinking: who is to blame? Student? Teachers? Policy makers? I feel everyone, even myself, should take a fair share of the blame. Thanks to the world's advancement in various technologies, students these days are so obsessed with games, social networks, and such other stuff. Gone are the days when students could boast amongst themselves about how many novels they have read. These days you would rarely find students who have time for novels that are not part of their academic prescription. Students prefer to use their free time, which is usually any time they are not in class, to waste time on Facebook and Whatsapp or in various cubicles they have turned into music studios. If not, then they are in one of these shacks showing Ackila movies, treating themselves with the now popular Chichewa translated movies.

Language acquisition, my language specialists tell me, doesn’t only dependent on what you learn in class. In class we get the grammar and all that technical stuff about language, but it is through hearing and reading that we get to learn most of the vocabulary and usage. I do not think the Facebooks and Whatsapps of this day are helping matters. I mean, with the heavy usage of contractions and emojis, and of course message forwarding, we are fast losing the grammar and vocabulary. In the end we are all speaking like Mr Broken English. Even when we attempt to text in English it is so flabbergasting.
I can also blame the teachers for not being as vigilant as they need to be. There are schools that take special initiatives to promote spoken and written English. I would be mean if I can’t commend their efforts. But then there are some teachers that when you listen to them speak or read the English they have written, you wonder what kind of English would their student speak or write. You remember that letter supposedly from a headmaster of a secondary school that made rounds on various social networks? You remember that school which boasted of teaching a British syllabus yet their poster was a defilement of the language of the Britons? These are just tips of the iceberg, but some of these teachers themselves struggle to find appropriate verbs and adjectives.

And for the policy makers. I wonder which devil commands them to be changing syllabi like they are changing diapers of a baby with diarrhoea. If you have been observant enough, you’ll find that some of the elements they put into or remove from the syllabus do not deserve to be inserted or removed. Maybe am just a layman, but these other things do not require rocket science expertise to understand. Of course, I would commend them for coming up initiatives such as the National Reading Programme which seeks to promote reading culture among students.

In all this kulubwalubwa the point I am trying to make is that as we are putting more effort in other subjects, we should surely think about English. You see, Richie, from Standard 5 to whatever education level we get to, the language of instruction is English. We can’t run away from it, we are Anglophone. Our official language is said to be English (though Chichewa and Tumbuka are also mentioned sometimes). The situation is so bad that even journalists, those we thought could be custodians of proper English, are busy besmirching it on radio, television, and sometimes even in the papers. At the rate we are going, we will soon be embarrassing ourselves like that footballer on some foreign television channel several months ago. We can do better, and we surely need to do better. And maybe not too good as our dear Minister of Information whose interview he did with BBC in English had a voice over in English too!

Koma kodi ukwatira liti? Ukuwachedwetsa ana ku sukulutu! Komanso achina ABJ Junior akufunikira amnzawo oti adzicheza nawo.

Kindest regards,

The Daydreamer.