Random Thoughts on a Friday Evening

Great expectations create frustrated men. That is what I read from the story titled the case of a prison monger in some book called Looking for a Rain God. You probably read that too, and might be wondering why I have decided to bring that up on a Friday evening. Well. I personally believe that the statement was either inaccurate or incomplete.

For some reason, I think that in as much as great expectations create frustrated men, they also have the potential to create dreamers and people who have visions who in turn become achievers.

So what are these great expectations and who has them? Well. Me of course. And a bunch of others who joined the medical field looking for guaranteed jobs from something called the Malawi Government and its Ministry of Health (why do they call it a ministry, anyway?)

Yes. I am talking about the 48 or so doctors. They are not 51 as we have been made to believe because some of them were not Malawians and they are back home; probably driving Nissan Tildas by now while their Malawian counterparts are languishing at home contrary to popular expectation they had they would be employed by now.

Some might wonder why this is such a big deal. Yours truly will lay it down for you. The thing is that when you graduate from the College of Medicine (sukulu ya ukachenjede ya za chipatala ndi mankhwala according to one George Limwado) with and MBBS degree, the degree does not make you eligible to practice. The point is that you need to work under supervision for some good 18 months of fun before getting certified by the so called medical council before you can have the license to practice. The original arrangement is that the government is supposed to pay the new graduates as they do the working in this 18 month period, but for some reason the government has decided that it does not need these doctors (implicitly).

There is one serious implication of that. Newly graduated doctors will not have a chance of practicing unless if the government decided to sort out the issue.

Result? Others have gone out while others are languishing at home. Probably wishing they had applied for Law studies after their premedical sciences. What a waste of 6 years.

Recently I was asked about how I reacted when I heard that the government was not hiring, considering the fact that I am in the next batch of medical graduates. Well. I will share what I said. This is very demotivating considering that we went in thinking of job security, anyway. On the other hand, it got me thinking that things are changing and we need to change and that is where this post becomes universal with everyone having a thing to learn from it.

I have heard a couple of times that the government is broke so we might need to brace ourselves for tough times. In fact rumor has is that our dear boma is considering wage reduction, so if you were celebrating on the premise that you are not a doctor, you need to “rethink again”. Back to the medical personnel, nurses whose deployment was reversed are still at home and I don’t think things will be any different for the Malawi College of Health Sciences students whose results have just recently been released.

Moral of the whole rant?

I have learnt in this year that most of us get caught by surprise in things that are not supposed to be surprising in any way. Consider a parent sending a child to a free primary school (and yes, thanks to Bakili Muluzi for that). The parent does know that the next level of school is secondary school which is not that free. Guess what a typical Malawian Parent does? Wait till the child gets selected to secondary school for him to have some short lived joy before starting to think of where he is going to get the fees money. Nanji akamapita ku koleji. That is where our friends from the west beat us. I am not saying everyone can manage this, but if all the capable people could think of doing this, I think some of the demonstrations by intellectuals would have not been happening.

Here we are. Always surprised by not so surprising things. Unfortunately this has spread like a cancer to the whole nation. We hardly have a vision as to where we want to develop and graduate to and the only vision that governs our country is the ruling party’s bid to win the next election. This is probably why many intellectuals know that there is a whole lot of unemployment and hostile business and investment conditions but are not acting on it. They want to be in for the surprise after graduating and staying without a definitive occupation for two years. Ladies and gentlemen, this whole issue of kukanda (Prince Muta uses this as another word for unemployment) is real but I am sure something can be done if we begin to look at it from a reasonably far distance.

I could write all night, but if we are to go back to where we started from, the main point is that these unmet needs should not create frustration in us. To everybody who reasons, this whole national crisis or whatever you call it should be a source of opportunities to make a fortune and impact.

One Dr Benjamin Mosiwa once said that intellectuals need to be thinking in terms of graduating as solutions and not as problems to the country. What he meant was that no one needs to graduate with nothing to do in mind, because in that case they just end up adding to the bad statistic of the unemployed. Something to think about.

I do not feel obliged to lay down what “doing something” about the future we want to have should be about. I believe that it is a tailor made thing based on personal aspirations and goals (assuming that we all have some). I hope this has provoked some thought process in you, and that you will not get surprised by something you clearly knew was coming.

Great expectations create something, but what will that something be to you? Will it be frustration or a brighter future?

Thoughts random. Yet not too random.

Tilombe…