By Ken Lipenga

I’m OK with Gettysburg! Some of the comments on the President’s inaugural speech sound like literary criticism essays from my Chancellor College students a long time ago, and that is a good thing. It means the bar has been raised.

The speech seems to signal a new higher level of public discourse, even if it may well have sent some folks scurrying to their history books.

From a linguistic and literary point of view, my favorite takeaway is the metaphor of the fractured bones and the pain involved in correcting that. It is poignant that the President takes his example from an unfortunate family experience, which I think underscores a point about authenticity.

The bit about being both a patient and physician would be well worth of a lengthy tutorial discussion in a literature class down at the college that God loves the most.

As usual my comments are mostly confined to form, the linguistic and the literary, with the inevitable accidental slippages into content, there being many better qualified than me to dwell on the political and other merits of this historic speech. The issue of language of politics has always been an area of interest for me.

So I am ok with the echoes of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

In fact it can be argued that this echo is a gesture of flattery to the Americans, sort of inviting them to work with the new Malawi whose leadership is presumably ready to make more than symbolic use of its acquaintance with American history. But that kind of sophisticated messaging would probably only work if we had a literate president in the White House.

Besides, the Gettysburg address was made towards the end of the civil war which eventually made slavery illegal in the US.

We know that some Americans have never accepted that outcome, and the issue is hot right now with the Black Lives Matter movement. It may or may not have been President Chakwera’s intention but I think it’s a good thing that there’s that hint of this in his speech.

There has been much praise flowing in the direction of the speech writer. That is inevitable. Regardless of how talented they may be, presidents and other rulers usually have someone else write their speeches for them, busy and weighed down as they are with matters of state.

In an ideal world, the speech writer is invisible. The moment the speech is handed over to the president, the king, or the emperor, he or she takes all credit for it. It is his or her speech.

The speech writer, who will most often be among those in the audience listening to it, does not normally whisper to those near him or her, boasting, “Did you hear that phrase? I’m the one who crafted it!”

In reality, however, people always manage to trace the speech writer and indeed some speech writers have become celebrities or been been praised for changing the course of history. Some historic speeches, like the Gettysburg, end up being studied as literature at schools and colleges. When that happens the speech writer obviously becomes a person of interest, to use a modern phrase.

In social media the writing of this speech is being attributed to one Pastor Sean Kampondeni, and the gentleman is being either praised or bashed depending on the standpoints of commentators.

We have no formal proof of authorship, but the style, and probably other considerations, appear to support the assumption of Kampondeni’s involvement.

Come to think it, if I were President and had Sean Kampondeni within my reach, even as son law or as is being claimed or whatever, there would be no debate about who should write my inaugural speech; such is his talent in the areas of language and fluent thought.

I have followed Pastor Kampondeni’s writings for some time and along with people like Idriss Ali Nassah and others, he’s just a breath of intellectual fresh air.

At one point during the court proceedings in Lilongwe, he came out to find that his car had been broken into and some items stolen by some of those involved in the demonstrations.

The way he wrote about that episode gripped me so much that I commented on Facebook about his extraordinary eloquence and analytical thought.

Judging from his writings, the pastor does not seem to me to be the kind of person who would want to be publicly praised for the inaugural speech even if he did write it.

Regardless of the speech’s authorship, delivery was everything. I listened to the speech while I was doing something else, but at some point the President’s passionate delivery stopped me in my tracks.

Anybody who has written a speech for someone else will be familiar with the mortifying feeling when a carefully crafted set of rhetorical passages is delivered blandly, devoid of any soul or rhythm.

So much poetry wasted by a philistine delivery. A humorous sentence read with a grim face. An important moment of pause ignored. For a speech to have impact, the speaker must feel the words. After all the speech is a script which the speaker must act out with his or her whole being.

Having been written by human beings this speech was not going to be perfect but it did not have to be. Perhaps in future speech writers will spare us the deja by avoiding certain formulaic phrases that other commentators are beginning to notice from the performances so far. There’s always room for improvement even after a “perfect” speech.

There are those who would have liked to see more in the speech. That is understandable given that what has just happened in our country has the feel of a revolution of sorts. But it is also my view that an inaugural speech is not a budget speech. It is not supposed to give you details of what the new government is going to do, more so in view of the absence of a full cabinet. It is meant mainly to inspire and give a glimpse of a new philosophical paradigm.

Today’s delivery fitted that bill. Regardless of who wrote the speech, the souls of writer and speaker were intertwined to produce a masterful delivery.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the writer’s and do not reflect the views of The Maravi Post or Publisher.