Anyone who is even just a little bit aware of Malawian culture knows that in Malawi, you cannot tell vulgar jokes at a funeral and expect people to think that you are sane.

With people starving and dying of hunger, and with no real solution to the plight offered other than empty every day claims that maize is coming when no one can see it, joke or not, the notion that the solution to the hunger problem is for people to start eating mice and grasshoppers is an insult of the highest order. It is the kind of discourteous joke that can only be told by an insensitive leader who really has no idea about the challenges and the indignity that his peoplehave to go through because of his own failure to provide the food security that was the linchpin of his electoral campaign.

Not that we should be surprised. You will recall that it is not too long ago that president Peter Mutharika’s minister of agriculture also offered a strange and impertinent solution to the hunger problem. He dared thoughtlessly to suggest that as Malawians, we eat too much, and that the solution to the food shortage caused by his government’s failure to plan carefully for food security was for us to start eating one meal a day!

President Mutharika quickly approved this rudeness and abuse of Malawians’ good humour and serene nature a few weeks later. At a rally held not too long after this, instead of rebuking the offensive remark and perhaps even firing the naughty minister, he declared that although people were dying of hunger, although there were no medicines and diagnostic test kits in hospitals and although patients were dying of curable diseases, as far as he, Arthur Peter Mutharika, brother to late BinguwaMutharika and president of the Republic of Malawi was concerned, he had no problem of any kind. “Inendiribepulobulemu!” he ejaculated.

Mutharika’s continual distasteful jokes are not simply an innocent failure at humour. They are indicative of the lack of seriousness in his leadership, and the contempt he has for us Malawians as people.What we need to do, as the electorate, is collectively to keep score and exact our vengeance when the day of reckoning comes.

In this regard, I would like to make two observations. The first is that the president is probably eating too much rats and grasshoppers that this diet is affecting his thinking and reasoning capabilities. This might help explain his insensitive, ill-timed and terrible attempts at humour and his failure to understand and connect with the problems that Malawians are going through because of a hunger which, had his administration been feeding on a proper maize diet, would have planned for and properly addressed long before now.

My second observation, in the alternative, is that if the president is not enjoying a rat and grasshopper rich diet, and he is sane and lucid as some people claim, then he should lead the way in demonstrating to Malawians how mice and grasshoppers can be the new solution to our hunger problems. I would like to challenge the president to issue a directive that will see only mice and grasshoppers being served at state house dinners and banquets. Charity begins at home.

Real people are dying. Real deaths. Their president’s response cannot be to joke about it by making suggestions that he himself could not even dream of implementing.

What makes this matter even worse is the attack from the president’s minister of information in a press statement directed at those who objected and pointed out that the president’s remarks were out of turn. In as much as I accept that the president indeed has a right to make jokes when interacting with the masses at political rallies, It is becoming difficult to decipher what statements coming out of his mouth need to be taken seriously, and which ones need to be considered simply the president’s attempt at playing the clown. What the president said is indefensible. The ministry of information’s attempt at fire fighting is even more misguided.

For instance, when the president in Blantyre claimed he plans to build another stadium and a five star hotel,was the president being serious or was he again being Mutharika the joker? At a time when people are starving, when there are no medicines in hospitals, when there are blackouts every day, when there are water shortages and the taps in the capital city of Lilongwe are on the verge of running dry, surely a president who thinks his priorities for the nation are another football stadium or another white elephant five star hotel must surely be dismissed as a clown!

As far as Malawians are concerned, the suggestion that in the face of serious hunger, the DPP’s new food security strategy is dependent on rodents and insects is as macabre a joke as talking of magnificent edifices when people are dying of starvation and curable diseases due to clear leadership failure and cluelessness. It’s not funny, Mr President. I am not laughing.