Is he alive then?
On Friday last week, in response to some question from her, momentarily faithless, faithful followers Sophia Tesfamariam wrote the following on the Facebook page dedicated to the then widely assumed dead Issias Afworki:
‘I believe Eri0TV and the Ministry of information were forced to respond because these mercenary Eritreans made phone calls using Robocalls to Eritrean homes and businesses…
When he bounced back to life explaining his disappearance as a mental ill health condition of many many, many people it reminded me of the story that an elderly gentleman once told me… here is a bit on how it goes…. Two friends grew old together and as many of their friends passed away one by one and they both became increasingly, aware that their turn was coming sooner than later the only questions were which one would go first and how the other one would react to that… so when one day one of them got ill he asked his life long friend to do his melqes for him and show him how he is going to grieve for him when he actually dies… and the dutiful friend decided to grant him that and here is his melqes (sorry this only works in Tigrigna and I don’t Tigrigna that well so this will need to be a joint effort of filling any blanks!)…
Arkey… AbXehay Mdri Kab Belka gebgeb
Kab ed seyti wediKa kabtmgeb
Kid ember ezaAlem do txigeb….
Loose translation (with advanced apology for the butchery of an otherwise beautiful language): My dear dear friend… now that you have started feeling cold and shivery even in bright sunshine… and you have succumbed to relaying on your daughter for your very basic needs… do yourself a favour and agree to go now (die) for one never really tires of this world…I am not qualified to qualify that story… but I would say this… life is kind enough to give us indicators of when we should call our fight for life off and give in to blissful rest and politically speaking last week was IA’s meleqes…and the general consensus was ‘phew now… maybe…just maybe we can finally begin to rescue Eritrea!... so I say Kid ember silTan do yixigeb?!
But since IA doesn’t follow internet but the ministry of information so clearly does and passes messages to him via his wife... here is my message to the ministry of information and particularly to the Deputy Junior minister: don’t your programming people tell you anything? On Friday afternoon you told the BBC world service that there were no plans for IA to appear on telly as he had no business that needs a ‘live’ TV address at present… few hours later there was a videoed announcement of the ‘live’ interview… the usual right hand left hand incongruency? Or a tip of the iceberg showing inconveniently?
Another thing that has been bugging me is Sophie’s niggle regarding Arbi Harnet’s robocalls (BTW thanks for the free PR Sophie dear…I promise I will return in kind and promte the SMART campaign one day)… our last Robocalls preceded the rumours and had nothing to do with IA’s death…so far as we were concerned he was as alive as he was last Saturday evening when them calls went through… so how could we have caused Ali Abdu to make an ass of himself and the MOI (please allow me the A word!)… with the CIA gaff? In any case Sophie’s endorsement and IA’s paranoia of Information and communication technology has confirmed clictiviisim as the new source of headache and I am sure fellow clictivists are itching to go!… glad to include the phone into the arsenal of weapons in the fight against injustice…Let the phones ring!
So is he alive then? yes he actually lived long enough to see the young people whose prospects he squandered fighting back! And all they had to do was log their laptops on and click on their send buttons… that sure is worth living a bit longer for…
And before I go for those who are blaming Assena for the rumours can I just say every dictator on our planet is rumoured dead several times in his life since beginning of the year we had nearly all remaining dictators rumoured dead! (Kim Hong-Un was supposed to be dead in February, Mugabe was supposed to be dying earlier this month too…)…rather than a reflection on Assena this actually was a confirmation of IA firmly in the list of the world’s remaining few dictators!
selam
