Even the Lion Protects Himself Against the Flies

African Proverb Meets Current Events: “Even the Lion Protects Himself Against the Flies”

The proverb is Ghanaian, the wisdom is universal, and the irony is entirely British. Even the mightiest creature on the savannah swats flies before they become a documentary on the BBC. A lion does not convene a Royal Commission to assess the fly. It deals with the fly and gets on with being a lion.

Humans — and particularly humans who went to the right schools — have developed a different approach. They ignore the fly, name the fly, fund a quango to study the fly, and eventually write a memoir about the fly in which they accept no responsibility whatsoever.

So let us apply this noble Ghanaian wisdom to the green and pleasant land. 🦁

The full proverb reads: “Even the lion, the king of the forest, protects himself against flies.” A broader collection of African proverbs and their meanings is available online, though reading it in full will leave you wondering why we ever abandoned any of it in favour of focus groups and ministerial statements.

British Politics: The Squeaky Hinge Gets a Whitehall Review

Westminster loves a small problem left to fester. A dodgy contract here. An aide on the wrong WhatsApp group there. One backbencher who just needs a quiet word before the tabloids get involved. Nobody ever has the quiet word. Instead, everybody waits to see if it blows over, and it never blows over.

The lion removes the tick on day one. The British government appoints a former civil servant to assess the tick, receives interim findings in eighteen months, and by the time the final report lands the tick has a peerage.

Across party lines, voter trust in institutions has been eroding for years, largely because the institutions keep doing the thing they promised not to do and then expressing surprise that anyone noticed. Fix the squeaky hinge or eventually the whole door collapses — and they will blame the door.

The NHS: Monitor It and Hope for the Best

Britain’s relationship with small health problems is deeply personal. You hear a strange pop from your knee and decide, firmly, to monitor it. Monitoring means walking awkwardly for four months, telling your GP it’s fine when it’s not fine, and eventually going to A&E on a bank holiday weekend because it’s now making a sound best described as two shopping trolleys disputing a car park.

The lion limps once and addresses it. The British patient books a telephone consultation, gets rescheduled twice, and starts Googling symptoms at midnight until the NHS website suggests something fatal.

Meanwhile, the small structural underfunding that everyone noticed in 2010 has had time to compound, metastasise, and generate a waiting list long enough to require its own postcode. Small habits and early interventions work. Grand speeches at party conference do not. One is free. The other costs the nation a great deal and fixes nothing.

The Housing Crisis: One Fly Becomes an Infestation

Britain ignored its housing shortage the way you ignore a slight damp patch behind the wardrobe. It’s probably nothing. It’s always nothing. Until the wardrobe collapses and you discover the entire wall is structural and the surveyor uses the word “historic” in a way that makes you want to lie down.

Planning permissions declined year after year. Green belt policy remained untouchable. Local objections to every proposed development went unchallenged. And now young people in full-time employment cannot afford to rent a room in the city where they work without spending seventy per cent of their income on it, which economists describe as “challenging” and landlords describe as “the market.”

The lion does not wait for a housing white paper to deal with the flies. The lion deals with the flies.

The Tech Industry: Ship It, Apologise Later

Britain’s tech sector has enthusiastically adopted the Silicon Valley tradition of ignoring small ethical concerns at high speed.

Engineer: “There’s a minor data issue.”
Executive: “Does it affect the launch timeline?”
Engineer: “Well — ”
Executive: “Ship it.”
Three weeks later your smart meter knows your browsing history and your boiler is in a data-sharing agreement with an advertising partner registered in Delaware.

Even the lion protects himself against fleas. The British tech ecosystem waits until the fleas have received seed funding, pivoted twice, and been invited to speak at a conference in Shoreditch.

Then comes the breach, and then comes the statement. The statement always contains the phrase “we take the privacy of our users extremely seriously,” which means the same thing here as it does everywhere: “We have hired a PR firm and printed lanyards.”

The Economy: Subscription Creep and the Cost of Living

British consumers are not immune to the slow accumulation of small financial catastrophes. One direct debit. Then another. Then a premium tier because the standard tier now has adverts and apparently adverts are the hill this household will die on. Then a second streaming service for the one show. Then a third for sport. Then a subscription box containing items nobody ordered but which arrive monthly like a cheerful invoice.

The lion does not finance eleven streaming services and a gym membership it hasn’t used since January.

A small unpaid balance becomes a fee. The fee becomes a letter. The letter becomes two letters in increasingly ominous typefaces. This becomes stress. The stress becomes a person whispering “I really should sort out a budget” while ordering a Deliveroo at half past midnight because the free market promised convenience and delivered a warm bag of regret to the front door.

Relationships: The Wet Towel Doctrine

This proverb performs particularly well in British marriages, where the tradition of Not Saying The Thing is older than Parliament and considerably more damaging.

One partner mentions, once, gently, that perhaps the wet towel might live on the towel rail rather than on the duvet.

The other says, “It’s fine, it’ll dry.”

Four years later they are sitting in a counsellor’s office in Tunbridge Wells unpacking the symbolic weight of textile placement and what it communicates about respect, effort, and the slow erosion of romantic goodwill.

The towel was never the towel.

Even the lion protects himself against small irritants. The British tradition is to marry the irritant, endure it in silence for a decade, and mention it once very quietly during a disagreement about a holiday destination, where it detonates like an unexploded wartime device nobody knew was there.

International Affairs: Dry Brush and Diplomatic Inertia

Britain has form here. The small tensions that were manageable, the minor provocations that were monitored, the bad actors whose behaviour was noted with concern. By the time concern escalates to action, concern has had time to become a crisis, and the crisis requires an emergency debate, a special envoy, and a press conference in which the Foreign Secretary uses the phrase “unacceptable” fourteen times without doing anything that would make it stop.

The proverb is simple: strength is removing dry brush before lightning arrives. Roaring after the fire has started is not strength. It is content for the evening news.

Or, as one unnamed Whitehall official reportedly said: “We thought it was contained until it became the entire brief.”

Social Media: One Troll, Infinite Comment Section

A mildly rude tweet used to dissolve into the void within hours. Now it becomes a 700-post argument featuring journalists, counter-journalists, people who weren’t there, people who were there but misremember it, three accounts with egg avatars, and one verified commentator who has confused this particular spat with an entirely different spat from 2019 but is in too deep to correct course.

The lion swats the mosquito and walks on.

The British media ecosystem quote-tweets the mosquito, commissions a column about the mosquito, invites the mosquito onto a panel, runs a follow-up piece about whether the panel was fair to the mosquito, and then publishes a long-read six weeks later asking: has discourse gone too far? The answer is always yes. Nobody does anything about it.

What the Funny People Are Saying

“They told us not to sweat the small stuff. Nobody mentioned the small stuff compounds interest.” — Jack Dee

“Britain’s entire political strategy is ignoring warning lights and hoping the dashboard goes dark on its own.” — Frankie Boyle

“We invented bureaucracy so that no individual has to take responsibility for the fly. Now the fly is in charge and filling out the forms.” — Dara Ó Briain

Final Thought: Be the Lion, Not the Inquiry

The proverb endures because the problem is eternal. Disasters rarely announce themselves. They arrive as small inconveniences, minor oversights, manageable nuisances that nobody quite manages. A crack left unsealed. A warning dismissed. A cost cut that saves money this quarter and costs everything next decade.

The lion does not convene a working group to evaluate the fly situation. It does not commission a feasibility study. It does not table the matter for the autumn statement.

Perhaps we should all be a little more lion and a little less “let’s see how it develops.”

Because history is largely a record of civilisations that dismissed mosquitoes until they were up to their necks in dragons, wondering how it all went wrong so suddenly — which it hadn’t, of course. It had been going wrong slowly for years. Nobody wanted to deal with it.

The lion would have sorted it on Tuesday. 🦁

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

The Ghanaian proverb “Even the lion, the king of the forest, protects himself against flies” is one of thousands of traditional African proverbs preserved and shared across generations as practical wisdom about vigilance, prevention, and the dangers of complacency. The saying has been shared internationally by outlets including BBC Africa and appears in numerous African proverb collections. This piece applies the proverb satirically to British political culture, NHS waiting times, the housing shortage, tech data practices, personal finance, and the cherished national tradition of not mentioning the problem until it is structurally catastrophic — each a domestic case study in what happens when the fly is left to its own devices for just a little too long.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]