Living Conditions; Random Thoughts

It is yet another Friday and as usual there had to be something to read for the Richie Online Regular. Here it is.

The Covid-19 pandemic continues to rage on. I am not sure if I made a mention to this but to avoid being overwhelmed by what I think of as unnecessary updates, I decided not to renew my television subscription and to keep away from any news site that provides real-time Covid updates. For some reason relating to work, I found myself looking at the updates only to find that the global case count has more than trebled from the last time I bothered to take a look. Moral of the story? The pandemic is real and as Malawians we out to be doing better in the prevention of the disease. The huge crowds that were put together by political party leaders in Blantyre over the past two days are only preaching hypocrisy on the part of the leaders who have preached physical distancing from time to time. We can do better.

In line with the same issue of political leadership, we saw the presentation of nomination papers by presidential aspirants over the past two days. I am told that out of over ten candidates who collected the nomination papers, only 3 managed to submit successfully. I am not too sure of the numbers but my point is on the fact that a majority of the candidates who collected the forms did not go through with the process. Chikomeni? Anyway. I should not single anyone out on this. Ours is a country in which we like to joke with everything including the very systems that provide for the election of leaders of this country.

I found myself discussing the prospects of a fresh election with a friend earlier this week. According to him, the current regime needs to go for the improvement of living conditions of people in the country. His argument was that the current leadership has been mismanaging resources that could have been used to uplift the livelihoods of ordinary Malawians.

At first, I found myself disagreeing with his assertions. The reason for that was very simple and it could simply be described using one word; naivety. I will explain.

For the longest time, I have held this idea that whoever gets to travel in the MG1 car does not affect what happens to the flow of food to my table. I work for a private organization and what happens there is pretty much independent of what happens in government (to a large extent). The fault in this line of thought it simple; there are a lot of people whose industries largely depend on government policy direction or lack of it. Also, not many would be privileged enough or make the choice to pick a job outside the civil service due to the nature of their professions. I was busy talking to this person about him making his own world better other than waiting for the government to make the country a better place when I had a rude awakening. The conversation we had at the time made me realize that while some of us may consider ourselves as people who are well off than the average countryman, our conditions are not as good as we think they are (or as they should be) and it is the pathological acceptance of these conditions that leaves the country entrenched in poverty.

There would be no better way to define living conditions of people in the country than to highlight the fact that most of Malawians do not have access to basic social services. Recent surveys have shown that less than 20 percent of people in Malawi have access to piped water. One would question the accuracy of the figures, but if this was up to 40 percent, I still wouldn’t have rejoiced. We can only leave to imagination the proportion of the citizenry that have access to electricity. Power and water are basic needs and we are struggling to provide them to a majority of the citizens; but there is another catch to it. Even those of us that have water taps within our compounds do not get to enjoy running water 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Need I say something about electricity? I guess not. Yet those of us who have water and electricity connections in the medium to high density areas of our cities have come to accept that as the standard of living even though we do not have all round access to such services.

Expanding on that, we could talk about other things like access to education. While others would say that they are impressed with the education system, every sober person would not be impressed with the same. I would cite big issue of lack of access to tertiary education. I wrote my University entrance examinations for the University of Malawi (which by then included Bunda College) in 2010. I am not too sure of the actual number of applicants but I am reliably told that after we wrote the examinations close to 6000 of us qualified for a place in the university. Unfortunately, there was only a place for about 2000 of us and that was it. The rest had to figure other options out which was not the easiest thing to do then as the University of Malawi and Mzuzu University were the main public universities then. The cost of private universities is known to be limiting for many and as a country we have not seen any reasonable expansion in our capacity to provide tertiary education except for the construction of the Malawi University of Science and Technology and a bunch of technical colleges. Even now with the Covid-19 pandemic, our institutions of higher learning have had to close indefinitely as they are not able to effectively provide online teaching and learning platforms. Yet some of us have accepted the status quo just because we managed to battle for and clench that university spot and bagged a degree.

We could talk about a lot of things that we have wrongly accepted as okay in this country; access to communication facilities, the cost of living, exorbitant taxes and bank rates, high fuel prices and all sorts of things that could use sorting. For most of use whose lives are just borderline bearable, we feel like we are there and as such have accepted that things can continue to stay the way they are, so long as we are not suffering. Little do we know that what we may think of as a normal life here could be better defined. It is good to have electricity in the house, but it is even better to have it on all day everyday. It is good to have water pipes in the house, but it is even better to not depend on water tanks for assurances of a continuous water supply. It is good to have access to the internet but it is even better to have stable connections at reasonable rates so that everyone can access. It is good to have secondary schools but it is even better to have enough public universities and colleges and to make the private ones accessible in order to improve higher education. It is good to have hospitals, but even better to have well equipped and well-staffed hospitals.

We have come to a point where most of us have accepted suboptimal living conditions as okay and perhaps that is why we do not demand for more from ourselves and our leaders. Here is the message from Richie Online today. Do not get comfortable. Do not accept the status quo. Things could get better, and the more we think that they can get better, the more we will think of ways of creating positive change.