The Malawian Dream

Friday again.

There has been a lot of talk about the economic hardships in the country and some have attributed it to the leadership we have or lack of thereof. While I might agree with that to some extent, I choose to believe that the main problem we have is that we do not have some sort of blueprint we can run on as a country. The end result is that the only vision we have as a country is the ruling party's bid for another mandate in power. Everything just revolves around that.

We might have had some visionary leaders in the past but somehow we were not able to adopt their visionary thought process and make it one for the country. The result is that when they in one way or the other left the hot seat we went back to square one and continued with business as usual; messing up our country in the course of it.

Dr Joyce Banda assembled a team of professionals at some point and if my memory serves me right the team was there to develop some long term goals for the country. The whole quest was lost along with the People's Party's defeat in the 2014 tripartite election and I am not sure if any other leader will think of resurrecting the plan.

That being said, I must say there are a lot of young people who would like to see things getting better in the country. Many would telll you something in relation to their field of expertise but what Malawi needs for starters is to sort out the basics before we can think of "actual development".

Our country has for long been dubbed as an agro based economy. I personally find that to he a lie. While agriculture might be a large contributor to our gross domestic product, I feel like the contribution is too small compared to the potential this country has in the same. Above that, we have greatly failed in subsistence farming as evidenced by the lack of food security in the country. 

There we are then. If we want to draft the Malawian Dream, this is where we should start from. Make sure that all the land and water have been used to their full capacity to feed every Malawian stomach all year round. After that we can begin to think of boosting production to gain control of the food market on the world stage. Only then will we be able to realise that the bans on smoking and quotas on tobacco are not something that we should be worried about when it comes to our economy.

Health of the people of this country is also another thing that we need to seriously think of when we think of the long term dream of the country. The interesting thing is that the health status is both an indicator and a contributing factor to the economy of the country. For a healthier nation, we do not need to have the fanciest hospitals or medical equipment. What we need is the strengthening of the health system we have to make sure that the basic needs. What we need is a health system that can be able to provide essential medicines and food for in patients before we move to having the state of the art health facilities, lack of which has rendered potentially curable diseases death sentences in the country.

I believe that having a healthier and food secure nation would be a great leap in as far as development is concerned. Sorting that out would mean that we will have a lot of resources, human, financial or otherwise allocated actual development of the country. Having sorted that, we could turn to other ways of boosting our economy through other areas like tourism, entrepreneurship and infrastructure development.

In my view, chronology is an important element to development. First things need to be sorted first. Everyone who claims to be a patriotic Malawian also needs to take a part in developing the nation.

I look forward to seeing this nation develop. I have a dream of a nation in which every citizen and the government will realize the need for developing the nation and rise above personal needs and gratification; all in a bid toove this nation from where it is to where it is supposed to be.

Are you up to the task?