Nepali Times

The Cabinet erupted into spontaneous applause on Thursday as the Prime Minister proposed a toast. No, it wasn’t to celebrate the end of the strike by fuel tankers after they were allowed to continue cheating the Nepal Oil Corruption. Rather, it was to celebrate an all-party consensus to ban alcohol at all public functions with immediate effect. 

Bottles of scotch were cracked open and the wine flowed freely at the PMO as jubilant members of the coalition raised their glasses to salute the rare and remarkable occasion in which leaders laid aside their deep partisan differences to come together on a matter of grave public interest.

“The agreement to ban booze shows that when it comes to human health (hic!) this government will leave no stone overturned or upside down, and we will work across party lines to have another party,” government spokesman Comrade Partha Chetri told reporters with a noticeable slur. 

Suitably lubricated, the Cabinet then dived right into the next point on the agenda which wasn’t to amend the constitution to convince dissident Madhesi parties to agree to local elections in April, but to nominate new Nepali Ambassador Extraordinaries and Plenipotentiaries to various countries around the world.  

Because there are more ambassadorial aspirants than there are nation states and territories in the world, things got a bit heated. The Honourable Ministers first started addressing each other with words that begin with the letter “Mu” and sound like a Japanese designer store, the name of which we cannot utter here because we are within earshot of minors. 

The name-calling soon turned into a fist-fight between political parties claiming plum ambassadorial posts, while factions within some parties wrestled each other and nearly defenestrated rivals vying for vacant embassy slots. 

Finally, in the national interest, two female candidates heading recruitment companies for overseas contract workers were selected for UAE and Oman.

It is an indication of the importance Nepal places on female empowerment that women head manpower agencies. This is proof that we do not believe in tokenism, we believe in hard cash. We honour womanpower agencies by nominating them ambassadors to countries where they have valuable clients.

The Cabinet also decided that since it was difficult to accommodate all political appointees from the 8 coalition partners and various factions therein for ambassadorships, Nepal would henceforth send envoys to all 195 countries in the world. (It would have been 196 countries, but we cannot send an ambassador to Taiwan because of our strict adherence to the One China Policy.)

The Prime Minister, however, is in an awkward position because he feels that even after we have opened embassies in both São Tomé and Príncipe thinking they were two countries, there are still comrades who insist on diplomatic postings.

So, he has hit upon a brilliant idea to appoint the remaining as Nepal’s Chargé d’affaires ad Interim to the Moon, Mars, Venus and some of the larger rocks in the Asteroid Belt.

If this goes on, we may have to venture even further afield — even outside the solar system. The discovery this week of seven new planets orbiting a sun 44 light years away could be considered for opening new Nepali embassies.

We can then just blast into space potential plenipotentiaries like the Ass.