Action: The Missing Piece

It t is a wonderful fly day (or Friday as you all call it). Some of you were probably thinking that we were not going to have a read for reasons ranging from the surprise Wednesday article through my busy working schedule to my Friday habits. All those have been defied and I have managed to create time for my readers who I love as much as I love my dear spouse.

On to the day’s business.

About a month or so ago we had something called UMP Awards and UMP festival. UMP may not be known to many so I will do a bit of explaining. The acronym stands for Urban Music Party and it was started by Zizwa and Kabuzi, the guys who formed the Biriwiri duo of the Daily Daily fame. The UMP is a company (or just a brand, really) that organizes yearly award shows for artists, producers and all those outstanding people who made music happen in the year.
To be honest, I never took interest in the festival in the early days of its inception. This year, however one of my friends got nominated for a category and I was very keen on helping him win. I sacrificed a couple of hundred kwachas and gave him a couple score votes in a bid to make him win against the heavyweights. The interest in the voting process got me flipping through the other categories and checking if there was anything or anyone worth voting for. Zinazi ndiulula. I ended up voting for Mizu Band for the band of the year category, BFB for producer of the year and Apse Mtima as song of the year. Those were probably useless details, but anthu amenewa anaitha this year anyway.

The reason I am talking about all this hibber jabber is the chain reaction of thoughts that emanated from some cyber discussions that I had with my friends about the Awards. At some point, one popular radio DJ in his neutrality posted about the awards urging his fans to vote in the process. Instead of picking up their phones and sending texts to the designated numbers to vote, the guys began voting in the comment boxes. Some keyboard warriors got on with it and said they were not going to vote because the awards were not credible. One would understand if they considered the people who scooped awards in some categories in the recent past. What they had forgotten was that it was probably their lack of voting and the winner’s campaign skills that had made their favorite lose. Being the keyboard warrior I am, I gave a sarcastic comment and told people to go and vote other than complain about something they had power to influence. Got a few likes and positive replies with that comment.

That discussion ignited a memory of how our very own Nyau King has never gotten the most in terms of awards from the international nominations he gets year in year out. I must admit that I am not Grin’s biggest fan but I feel like his hard work needed to get him more than what he has now. Here is what happens. He gets a big nomination on the African stage. He even goes on to organize and host a party where he woes the half-drunk patrons to vote for him in the awards only to get below satisfactory results. It is interesting how some of us have wanted our boys to get these pieces of polished metal when we have done nothing to make it happen.

Reflecting upon all this made me realize that this whole thing of not voting for things like music awards (which are rather trivial) is a reflection of an even bigger problem that we have as Malawians. We simply do not like to work for what we want.

Translating this whole issue of choice into the political scenery, there are some who opt not to choose national leaders despite having a candidate of near similar attributes to their ideal leader. I have even heard of people who would want not to vote in 2019 just because they are feeling the pinch of living under the DPP government. Sad for them, if they carry on with such an idea what they will end up doing is to passively re-elect the same folks they wanted out. More often than not, this whole premise to ideas of apathy originates from the fact that people think that their action or effort is inadequate. In these cases, people like to think about the cup and lake analogy. What someone made me realize recently is that a few cups into a big space do not matter much, but if the 17 million of us (or at least people who were able to out of that) were to pour a cup into Lake Malawi, the level would change significantly. Well. In a way.
One Henry Kachaje (that entrepreneurship coach) has on a number of occasions given examples of how people get excited about his seminars. He shared on how people marveled when he taught them how they could make their first million with K10 000.00 (plausibility ya iyiyi tidzaikambiranabe) only for them to sit on the ideas. The year is going towards the end and most of us will be drafting resolutions and 2018 goals but very few of us will take action to make those happen. We will find ourselves thinking of what a wasted year 2018 was a year from now when all we needed was action to bring our dreams to reality.

Lately, I have observed how much young us young people like to talk about how other people are succeeding. We like to discuss the Range Rovers so and so drive and the sort of houses they live in but not of us get into a serious discussion and get to enquire as to how they got there, so that we can learn from them and forge our own paths from such. Just like the people who wanted some artist to win the artist of the year award without for them, we expect to gain that academic excellence without sweating for it. We want to have the perfect relationship without putting out much of an effort. We want to be “there” spiritually without doing what it takes to be so and we want to get that fat account without getting our brains to work and hands dirty. We want to have things change in our lives and in the world when we are not willing to take that baby step in changing them. We lack this spirit of being people of action.

There are people all over preaching about how we need to dream big. Perhaps what we need to now focus on is the action bit. I am pretty sure that there are a lot of people that are dreaming in color but the only thing standing in between them and their dreams is the lack of action. There are many who know how best to solve our problems as a nation, but the reason we are still here is that they are sitting on the know-how of the same.

Someone once said that if you want to change the world, you need to start with making your bed when you wake up. What he was trying to say was that it is starting out to doing the simple small things that fuel us to do even bigger tasks that can make a lasting change in our lives and the world at large.

Think about it…

You probably have a thousand ideas of how you can make your life or your country better. Lets forget about the 999. What if all of us set out to work on one idea at a time? Perhaps its not about what we dream but the action we take.

Have a wonderful weekend.