POLITICAL PARASITES

Political Parasites

'Did you hear the cheek of that little pipsqueak, Mouth Mulufyanya?' asked Sara in exasperation, 'saying that Kabolala Bakalamba should keep his job as Scrounger General!'
Just then Amock came in with the bottle and four glasses. 'Sounds as if we need a drop of brandy,' he said, 'to calm us down.'
'It's monstrous!' continued Sara, apparently unaffected by the soothing liquid, 'did you hear what Mulufyanya actually said? Forgive him, he just made a mistake. We all make mistakes. As if he had been found pocketing the office newspaper, rather than looting the national treasury which he had sworn to protect. If he had any moral sense he would have resigned when he was first arrested.'
'Your argument is incoherent,' I observed. 'If he had any moral sense, he would never have looted the national treasury in the first place.'
'So now,' Sara continued, 'the entire National Excretion Committee has to meet to decide whether he should be excreted.'
'I think you've missed the force of Kalaki's earlier point,' said Amock. 'It is not possible for the excreta on the National Excretion Committee to smell their own stink. The smell that we find disgusting is quite normal to them.'
'Look,' said Jennifer firmly, as she drained her glass and reached for the bottle, 'it's no good just dismissing the ruling elite as a pile of excrement. The MMD may have begun as a Mere Mound of Dung, but now it's Much More Dangerous.'
'Dangerous dung,' I laughed.
'That's the problem with current political argument,' sighed Jennifer,
'it has degenerated into crude metaphors amounting to mere insults. We
need a more sophisticated metaphor on which to base a meaningful
analysis of the economic and social role of the MMD in its systematic
destruction of the nation. We have to understand the MMD as the
Movement of Malignant Drones.'
'Drones are just useless creatures, that have to be fed by others,' said Sara. 'I don't see the analytic power of such a flat and boring metaphor, it doesn't even explain the stink. I prefer the dung.'
'A drone is a parasite that lives off the rest of society,' Jennifer
explained. 'But a malignant parasite is much worse. It is so greedy
and foolish that it eats too much of the host off which it feeds,
thereby destroying both host and parasite.'
'You still haven't explained the notorious stink that comes from MMD.'
'An entire country,' explained Jennifer, 'is a complete integrated
system, rather like the human body. Politicians are the parasites that
live in the bowels and live off us, without doing any work
themselves.'
'So the stink comes from the bowels?' Sara wondered.
'Not entirely. Being a malignant parasite, MMD is eating too much, and is destroying its host body, Zambia. Not being content with just staying in the bowels and taking their share of the regular budget supply, they have now become so greedy that they are eating at the organs. The body is dying bit by bit, causing an increasingly nasty smell which is beginning to stink in people's nostrils.'
'But how do these mere nasty little parasites, previously specialised in eating shit, manage to break out of the bowels and begin eating the other organs?'
'They have many strategies. For example, the Police Corpuscles, that
are supposed to control parasites, have instead been infiltrated by
MMD parasites. This has allowed the parasites to run out of control.'
'But surely,' said Amock, 'our body has a strong constitution, which keeps a balance and separation between one organ and another. The bowels can't just start eating the kidneys and the liver!'
'So we were taught at school,' said Jennifer. 'But a destructive
parasite called the Nasty Cardiac Creeper, the dreaded NCC, has crept
into the heart and destroyed the body's entire constitution.'
'Even so,' I said, 'parliament is the brain which remains in overall control. It can pass statutory regulation to stop the MMD from eating the entire body.'
'Unfortunately,' said Jennifer sadly, 'the Movement for Mental Deterioration has caused the brain to slip down into the bowels. Instead of speaking sense out of the mouth, parliament now speaks nonsense out of the rear end.'
'No longer the voice of the people,' said Amock.
'The voice of the parasites,' said Jennifer.
We all stared glumly into our empty glasses. 'I know what we can do,' I said brightly.
'What?' they all said, hopefully.
'We can have another round!'
Which we did. But still we sat there glumly, without any further
inspiration from the bottle. 'We need a French brandy,' said Amock.
'This South African is too dull.'
'I know what,' I said brightly. 'Since statutory regulation can't work, we must try self regulation. It's in all our interest that everybody restrains themselves. The parasites must eat only half the food in the intestine, and not eat the essential organs, or interfere with the body's constitution. Excessive parasitism will destroy Zambia and we shall all die, including the parasites themselves. We must appeal to their intelligent self interest.'
'Parasites,' said Jennifer slowly, 'don't have intelligence, they only have self interest.'
'In that case,' said Amock, 'it's inevitable that the body will soon
be destroyed by this Massive Malignant Disaster of insatiable
parasites.'
'We need some strong medicine,' said Sara, 'to deal with the situation.'
'Yes,' said Jennifer. 'We need a bottle of Jerry Rawlings Parasite Solution. One dose of that would flush out and destroy all the parasites.'