Of Playfields and Billboards

 

Well. I cannot think of any other way of starting this than apologizing for the silence in the past few weeks. Some of you went on to clearly voice out your anger for the lack of Richie Online pieces using unpalatable language that I cannot repeat but I have since forgiven. And forgotten of course.

The past two weeks have been so full of social media noise. I will pick two main issues that I will choose to comment on for today but before that I should remind Malawians on this platform that today marks a year since the incumbent was sworn in as President. Whatever you do with that information is completely up to you.

To the issue of the day. By now every regular reader of this blog knows that I like my social networks. The modern day social media has trends and it has memes. One of such was the issue of “pa ground”. The trending statement that says “pa ground sipali bwino” loosely entails that the playfield is not good enough; making the game difficult. People further qualified it saying that the playfield was muddy or rocky or whatever their creative minds could come up with.

At first, the “pa ground” statements were used to describe the economic situation in Malawi. Many have lamented that for the past year and a half or so things have not been going on well. Some have gone on to point a blaming finger on the government citing that since the coming in of the Onse administration (typo; I meant Tonse) money has been hard to come by. I am not sure that I have the right to comment on such things because as a person who is confined to research work and has no side hustles, my cash flow has hardly been affected. If anything, what is killing me is the rising cost of living and bundles. On the other hand, some of the “buyers” have disappeared which makes me think that there might be some substance to the claim. Later people extended the whole pa ground thing to relationships and marriages. Now, those are things I would rather not comment on.

The whole pa ground thing was not interesting but I loved it when the responses started flying in. One of my good friends posted that his playfield was very okay. People hated him for it, but this man was just describing his own reality. Perhaps the timing was just not right. Then there were motivational speakers who came to lecture us that we are responsible for making our own playfields better because we are responsible for our livelihoods. One pastor went on to say that however tough the ground may be, Christ can level it. With the influx of the responses, some went on to clarify what they meant when they said the playfield was not good for them. To them, this was a street statement that described the general financial conditions and the fact that the positive change they were expecting was not happening. In short, the ghetto youths did not expect the street statement to have any responses from motivational speakers, pastors or individuals who had a contrary opinion. In short, to the masses, the playfield remains unfavorable and as such no one should make any attempt as disputing the fact that pa ground sipali bho.

While people were sort of winding up with the pa ground thing there came something even more interesting. Yeah. You guessed that right; the billboard. For those of you who have not yet liked the Mikozi page on Facebook (I strongly recommend that you do if you have not), there was a man who put a billboard of a birthday message to his wife outside the lady’s workplace. Now… I should point out at this point that as a nation we are obsessed with trivia and this whole billboard birthday message thing took the nation by storm.

First to react were the men and the reactions were mostly hostile. Some accused the man who put up the billboard of taking things too far. In their view, that was an overkill which had put pressure on the male species with spouses. Others went to threaten that if Levi saw the billboard he was going to come chasing after her. Now if you do not know Levi, let us just say he is one guy who drives a customized Volkswagen car in Lilongwe. You actually hear him before you see him because of the noise his car makes. He made it to the Malawian Hall of Fame for snatching a lady from one of Malawi’s celebrities. Then there were others who directed the venom towards women. According to this kind, everyone who was getting ideas of being on a billboard was supposed to remember that on the billboard was a working wife as opposed to a girlfriend or any other sort of spouse who does not work within town. Few men insinuated that they were going to put out billboards of their own spouses, creating what they called the billboard challenge.

The ladies? Some started posting their nice pictures saying that their pictures deserved to be on billboards of specific dimension at specific places. One sent me a picture and asked that I use my own money to erect a huge billboard with a love message at the Independence Arch. As a member of the Broke Men Association of Malawi which you may have heard of under the banner of the Stingy Men Association, my response was the typical “I will see what I can do”. That was not the thing, though because obviously some of these billboard demands were satirical. Some of the ladies started throwing shade at men for being hostile towards the man of the moment for his romantic gesture. What they did not realize is that most of the reactions that people were peddling were not as serious as others thought there were. I may have pointed out that we love trivial things. We like to have something to talk about and this one was it. I know some of the screenshots that went viral, being referenced as hate responses towards Billboardman to have been from his friends who I happen to know personally. And then there were the usual people who like to comment on everything in a negative way. Their comments went viral too. At the end of the day, the billboard was the talk of the town and it provided good entertainment for a day or two.

So what did the Board of Directors at Richie Online learn from the whole billboard and pa ground saga? Well. We will start with the whole “pa ground” thing. Now this was a street statement for fun but others including the former Finance Minister did not skip a chance to weigh in on the statement. I should also mention the rappers, the pastor and motivational speakers who thought that somehow we needed to hear from them on the matter. Then there is me, of course. Nkhani zopanda ntchito but we have turned it into an article. That, is the art of being Malawian and it is something that will not change anytime soon. For those of you who do not like trends in the name of being mature, Malawi will continue to be an irritating country for you. If you want to have serious interpretations to anything that is trending, I guess some of those opinions are best kept to oneself. But those are thoughts from Naperi.

The billboard. The best way of looking at this issue is from the understanding of why this issue became the talk of the town in the first place. Let me explain. The reason we talked so much about a birthday that did not concern us is that someone expressed his affection and sent a birthday message in a way never seen before in Malawi. That was a first and people talked about it. There are different ways of expressing affection to our loved one and if it is unique, people will talk about it in the same way people talked about those who bought their spouses cars as birthday and bridal shower presents. The key is to love yours to the best and to express your feelings to him or her in a way that impresses. If your intention is to impress the masses and to be the talk of the town, do your own version of a billboard; a public stunt. If your intention is to build love, do something in private. Or you could combine the two, really. It is a free country.

There we are then. We have weighed in on the useless issues and yet we have drawn some important lessons.

Just a public service notice. If your spouse is going out to watch Euro, kindly be notified that there is no Euro game today.

 

Nice weekend.