On Excuses

Another Friday

Having been annoyed by the conduct of people who were supposed to be making me feel happy and relieved over the past week, I thought I was going to write a very long and impolite rant on friendship management. I wanted to satirize the readership on how they should wish the author the best when he is celebrating his anniversary with Nabanda, wish him a quick recovery when he is down with sepsis (that is what the doctor who saw him wrote) and help him with airtime for posting and sharing the next article. I however decided against that when something else came to my attention.

We will not go around this issue. This is about ESCOM, the body Malawians trusted to provide power to the nation. If you do not share a line with the hospitals, state house or the College of Medicine, you should have an idea of what a nuisance ESCOM has been when it comes to power cuts. I think I am now used to that. When power goes off at 6 am it comes back a few minutes to 2 pm. If it goes off at 2 pm it comes back sometime between 7:30 and 8 pm. That is the usual schedule but there are also some night specials (at least two of those in a week). Somehow that has stopped annoying me because I do have it covered, usually.

There is, however, one thing that annoys me about ESCOM (and of course Blantyre Water Board); the excuses they make. In the rainy season ESCOM will always give you the excuse that there is silt and stuff making it difficult for them to generate power. In the dry season we hear about the low water levels (this happens year after year) and one would wonder when we have just enough water to generate power without causing any trouble with the silt and stuff. In April and May, maybe? Whatever the answer to that question is, I think that it is time we moved from these stupid (oh, yeah I used that word) excuses and moved on to fixing the problems we have.

ESCOM may be the classical example but from the look of things these excuses are made everyday from across the professions and citizenry (if you know what I mean).  Classical examples? “Yes, we do have corruption in Malawi but the same is true for Zambia”. That is a direct quote from a big person in our government. “The problems we have with electricity are also being faced in surrounding countries”. What a way of self justification from someone who works with the Electricity Supply Corporation. From the look of things it seems like people who are supposed to be thinking innovatively to solve our issues go into the office just to think of excuses with which to feed the nation. Should we be surprised? I think not.

This culture of working on finding excuses over ways gets to be cultivated into us from a very tender age for some reason I am not sure of. When we failed a test the defense was that only a quarter of the class made it. We used to carry that around, asking about the statistics every time instead of striving to get into the little fraction of those on the positive side of things. This sort of thing gets carried into high school (by this I mean secondary school; CDSS), college and eventually into our workplaces, marriages, churches, communities and all that matters. Excuses, excuses and more excuses.

One would wonder why this matters. If having running water and power all day everyday is a basic need to you, then I think this should matter to you. Point is that if we are to have things the better way in this nation it will take a strong will from us Malawians and not some IMF to fix it. If we want to have all the basic needs, if we want to have the best health and education system, if we are to be the tourism (someone mentioned investment in these lines too) heaven we wish to be, if we are to turn from an importing to exporting nation, if we are to win a medal at the Olympics and whatever good thing people have written in their manifestos (that is where you can find some nice visions for the country), we need to rise above excuses and find ways. We need to get on our feet and start to be aiming high. If there are blackouts in Malawi, we need to look to Rwanda and learn from how they solved the issue that side other than looking down to how Zambia is doing way worse than us. Of course I did not recommend a study tour to Rwanda because Google is always available.

Having said that, I think this needs to start on a personal level. We need to move from being people of the perfect excuses to people who can find ways in our academics, spirituality, relationships, finances and every other aspect of life. Only then will we be able to take this to another level and make things better for the country. Apo biii….