It was not registered with PACRA. This was deliberate. Registration would have made it accountable, and accountability was for institutions that intended to be fair.
A young man named Mwaba learned this in the commonest way most men learn everything: too late, embarrassingly and in public.
Mwaba was 27, employed as a shop attendant and in possession of two working shoes and a bicycle whose only reliable braking system required him to drag one foot along the ground and hope for cooperation from both the road and providence. The most conspicuous problem, however, was its severely worn-out tyres. Mwaba rented a small room and sent part of his salary home each month to support his sibling’s education. Having such qualities in that economy made him what the aunties called “Marriage Material.”
He had fallen, catastrophically and against all professional advice, for a woman named Beatrice.
Beatrice worked at a mobile money booth. She remembered which customers sent money, received money or did both. She appeared to wear her heart on her sleeve, although the most important parts of it remained carefully folded away. She also possessed the rare gift of rejecting a man so decisively that he briefly reconsidered the institution of romance itself.
Mwaba had always noticed her because her booth was right in front of his shop. Beatrice first noticed him when he returned the extra 50 kwacha she had mistakenly given him after processing his withdrawal.
Neither admitted these things.
Instead, Mwaba began unnecessarily withdrawing and depositing money. His mother, receiving unusually frequent transfers, briefly believed her son had received a promotion.
Eventually, after three months of unnecessary mobile money transactions and increasingly weak excuses, Mwaba told Beatrice that he loved her.
He had rehearsed the speech for a week. In rehearsal, it was dignified and persuasive. In reality, his voice broke and he forgot most of what he had meant to say, and all of how he had meant to say it.
Beatrice looked at him for a long moment. She liked him. This complicated matters.
Mwaba may have spoken directly to Beatrice, but in reality, one did not propose to Beatrice alone. In that place and time, every proposal first had to survive the scrutiny of the woman’s circle of friends. Mwaba had submitted an application to Beatrice, and she forwarded it, as was procedure, to The Board
The Board convened, as it always did, on a Saturday, in a hair salon that smelled of burnt hair, hair oil and a lot of judgment.
The Board comprised four women.
There was Bwalya, the de facto Chairwoman, who had personally terminated eleven relationships and regretted none of them. At least that is what she told everyone.
There was Mwansa, Head of Due Diligence. Mwansa could trace a man’s entire romantic history using nothing but a stare, an unnamed source and the phrase, “I am not saying anything, but…”
There was Esther, Head of Compliance. Esther’s responsibility was to ensure that every approved suitor met the minimum standards. These standards had never been written down, because writing them down would have exposed their contradictions.
And there was Ntombi, the Secretary. Ntombi was small in stature, so her friends called her Auntie Small Small. Her enemies called her Little Ntombi. Ntombi took the minutes and, more importantly, took every disagreement as an attempt to dominate her on account of her height.
Beatrice sat outside while they deliberated. From behind the thin wall, she could hear her future being discussed between the hum of hair clippers and the occasional shout of another customer objecting to the price of braids.
The dossier on Mwaba was read aloud.
“Employment: confirmed,” said Mwansa. “Bicycle: confirmed. Tyres: partial.”
“Note the tyres,” said Compliance.
“Noted,” said the Secretary, noting the tyres.
“Character,” continued Due Diligence, consulting her findings. “He was once observed purchasing a plastic bag full of mangoes and eating them greedily as he walked along the street, without offering a single one to anyone.”
A silence fell over the room of the kind usually reserved for news of a death.
“How old was he,” asked the Chairwoman, “at the time of the Mango-gate scandal?”
“He must have been 17. We were both in Grade 12," Mwansa responded.
“The heart does not age,” said Compliance darkly, “and neither do bad manners.”
At the far end, Beatrice lowered her head to hide a smile. She wondered how an ordinary act of adolescent selfishness, committed years earlier, could be admitted as evidence against the man he had become. She considered mentioning this, but The Board regarded recent evidence of kindness as a common tactic among applicants.
The investigation continued.
“He does not own a house.”
“He is only twenty-seven,” Beatrice called through the wall.
“The applicant will not address The Board through management,” replied the Chairwoman.
“He wears the same blue shirt every Sunday,” said Mwansa.
“Blue is his favourite colour and he has many shirts,” said Beatrice.
“Or his only one,” said Compliance.
Little Ntombi recorded both possibilities.
The rejection arrived by WhatsApp the following afternoon, while Mwaba was attending the church youth meeting held every Sunday. It had been carefully composed by the Secretary, and Mwaba preserved a screenshot of it for the rest of his life, just in case Ntombi had activated disappearing messages on WhatsApp.
Dear Applicant,
Following review of your submission, The Board regrets to inform you that your proposal has not been successful at this time.
Reasons cannot be disclosed, as reasons are the property of The Board.
You are welcome to reapply after a period of self-improvement, the length and nature of which will not be specified.
We wish you the very best in your future endeavours, elsewhere.
Yours in governance,The Board
He read it five times.
The first time, he thought it was a joke. The second time, he searched for a sentence that might contain hope. The third time, he became angry. By the fourth, the anger had gone, leaving behind the quieter pain of feeling that strangers had measured his life and found it insufficient.
The fifth time, he copied the message into an AI chatbot and asked what it meant, hoping the machine might discover some possibility his readings had missed.
He went, as generations of rejected men before him had gone, to the quiet place behind the church. By then, it had a bench, installed by a council that understood demand.
He sat among the other wounded and shed the customary two tears, blaming the dust, as was tradition.
But what hurt him most was not the rejection. It was the possibility that The Board might be right. Perhaps love belonged to men with houses, matching furniture and bicycles capable of stopping on command. Perhaps a person had to finish becoming worthy before asking anyone to share the unfinished life.
And here the story would have ended: filed, stamped and forgotten, another proposal declined by a properly functioning committee.
Except that The Board had made one error.
It had forgotten the single flaw in all systems of governance, the loophole no bylaw can close:
Management can overrule the Board.
While the committee deliberated over mangoes, shirts and tyres, Beatrice was the actual and only decision-maker, the woman whose life this all concerned. She had been conducting an assessment of her own.
She knew Mwaba was not ready. Neither was she.
She knew he might disappoint her. She also knew that caution could disappoint her just as thoroughly, only more slowly.
She understood something The Board did not: the remedy is in the poison. The very uncertainty that made love dangerous was what made it capable of changing a life. Remove the risk completely and one did not obtain perfect love. One obtained a transaction, properly documented and emotionally vacant.
During that week, Beatrice noticed Mwaba’s absence from her booth and began to question whether she had outsourced her own choice. The Board’s standards might protect her from embarrassment, she realised, but they could not protect her from loneliness.
By Wednesday, Beatrice found herself looking up whenever a bicycle passed.
By Saturday evening, Beatrice had reached her own decision. The following Sunday, she summoned Mwaba.
She found him behind the church, sitting upright and insisting to anyone who would hear that the dust had become unusually aggressive with his eyes.
She sat beside him.
“The Board rejected you,” she said.
“I received the minutes.”
“They were not minutes.”
“They felt very long.”
For a while, they watched a chicken cross the churchyard with the confidence of a creature answerable to no committee.
Then Beatrice informed him, kindly, that The Board’s decision had been reviewed at the executive level and reversed with immediate effect. She added that he should stop the week-long pity party because people had begun to notice his sadness.
Mwaba looked at her.
“Why?” he asked.
Beatrice could have mentioned his honesty, his gentleness or the way he listened without waiting for his turn to speak. She could have produced evidence and indicators. But none of those things fully explained it.
“For no sensible reason,” she said. “I simply choose you.”
Mwaba laughed then, not because it was funny, but because relief sometimes escapes the body wearing the wrong clothes.
The Board was furious.
The Board convened an emergency session. It issued a statement warning of procedural collapse, institutional overreach and the dangerous precedent of allowing the woman whose life was under discussion to make the final decision herself.
The statement was ignored, which is the fate of all statements.
Mwaba and Beatrice married.
Their life together was not the glowing road people imagine when they look back at a choice from a distance. It was a real road in Chikumanino: uneven, crowded and occasionally flooded with sewage, even during the dry season. There were arguments about money, forgotten errands and relatives who arrived without warning and stayed as if protected by international law.
Mwaba sometimes wondered whether he had married too early. Beatrice sometimes imagined a quieter life with a man who owned a car and never required anyone to push-start it. These were thoughts they kept to themselves for fear that society would treat them as pariahs for admitting that love had not eliminated every doubt.
Even so, they built a home in which laughter survived bad months. They raised children. They buried people they loved. They forgave each other for ordinary failures and a few extraordinary ones. The bicycle was eventually replaced, although Mwaba kept it for sentimental value.
Three years later, Esther—who had once treated another woman’s heart as a compliance matter—discovered that her own was no easier to govern. She was assembling a Board to review a man who had applied to occupy the vacancy in her heart.
When Beatrice told Mwaba about it, he approved immediately.
Then he heard that the young man owned very little that The Board would consider worth recording.
He demanded a full investigation.
Beatrice, listening from the kitchen, laughed so loudly that he remembered himself.
That evening, Beatrice called Esther to impart the only wisdom she had ever earned.
The Board would advise caution, she said. Boards always did. No one ever blamed caution for a broken heart, Beatrice said, although it could quietly cause one.
"Patience is valuable," she said. "But sometimes fear disguises itself as patience."
"That is comforting," Esther said.
"I am not finished. Whatever you choose, you will regret it. Not because you chose wrongly, but because the road you did not take stays paved and lit forever. No potholes, no unpaid bills, no difficult mornings. And walking along it, a better version of you—younger, certain, never once tested by anything real."
Esther was quiet for a moment. "So there is no right choice."
"There is only which regret you can live with."
"That is not very comforting either."
"No," Beatrice admitted. "But it is honest."
"You being right means I owe you an apology," Esther said, and began to laugh.
"Go ahead. I am listening."
"I said I owe you an apology," Esther replied. "That means you will receive it at some future, unscheduled date. Perhaps as a present on your next birthday."
They both burst out laughing, said their goodbyes and ended the call.
Esther considered Beatrice’s words.
The following morning, she informed The Board that its services were no longer required. For the first time, Compliance had failed to comply with itself.
She did not marry the man immediately. Choosing one’s regret, she had learned, did not require abandoning common sense. It required accepting that common sense could advise her but could not live her life on her behalf.
In time, Esther married the man The Board would never have approved, and they were reasonably happy. Not perfectly. Because perfect happiness is usually the invention of people observing from outside, but in the specific and hard-won way of those who take responsibility for the lives they choose.
There were days when Esther wondered whether The Board had seen something she had refused to see. There were also days when she imagined that some untrodden path might have led her to a larger house, an easier marriage or a version of herself who never doubted anything.
Then she remembered that the unlived road appeared smooth only because no one had ever forced it to carry the weight of an actual life. Ing'anda ushikalamo baikumbwa umutenge, as the old adage goes.
She returned to the difficult, ordinary life before her and refused, ever after, to blame it on the dust in Chikumanino.