The rise of the national eavesdropping industry

Maybe I am being paranoid, My Lord, but I have come to a startling conclusion: Nyasaland is the only country in the solar system where being a “certified informer’ is a more lucrative career path than medicine or engineering. We don’t just survive; we thrive on being the voluntary ears and eyes of whoever happens to be sitting on the throne or who is calling the shots. It is a heritage of betrayal, My Lord.

We are the masters of the national snitch. It began during the fight against colonialism, when the indigenous among us realised that whispering the secrets of the freedom fighters into the ears of the imperialists was a shortcut to a better grade of tea and a slightly taller hat. We gave these pioneers a name that still tastes like vinegar: Akapirikoni.

When the political hard drive was finally wiped and pluralism was installed, the Akapirikoni didn’t go extinct; they simply upgraded their software. In the old days of the Lion of Nyasaland, they reported you for not wearing a badge or for wearing the wrong shade of red. When the Chairman and his Yellow Party took over, the informers suddenly developed a sudden and violent allergy to any colour that wasn’t the shade of a ripe banana.

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Innocent citizens were victimised not because they stole money, but because a patriotic whisperer told the boss that they looked ‘too Cockerel or ‘too Blue’ in the privacy of their own living rooms. My Lord, you can trace this DNA through every version of our operating system: from Mose wa Lero, through Amayi, the original Mapuya, the brief Lazaro update and now the high-definition surveillance of Mapuya 2.0. It has reached a level of absurdity that would make a spy novelist weep with envy.

We now have people following public servants even to the toilet. They aren’t there to ensure the plumbing works; they are there to glean any grunt or sigh that might prove kuti ameneyo siwathu (that he belongs to the enemy camp). My Lord, there is already a list of loyalists waiting in the hallway, CVs in hand, waiting for the toilet intelligence to get you fired.

It breeds a culture of active laziness. Why work when you can simply whisper your way to the top? In Nyasaland, especially in the public service, the person who does the most work is usually the person who is most suspected because they are too busy to spend time in the corridors sharing the latest update with the appointing authority.

My Lord, I fear for this country. We may have a leader who truly has the welfare of the people at heart, but that heart could be pumped the toxic sludge of kapirikoni lies. The tragedy, My Lord, is that our leaders have developed a taste for this junk food.

They don’t want the cold, bitter medicine of the truth; they want the warm, sugary comfort of lies. They want to be told that everyone loves them and that the only reason things are failing is because of “Saboteurs” identified by the professional snitches. I wait for your direction, though I’ll be careful what I say into the microphone because someone might probably be reporting my typing speed to the authorities as we speak.

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