Of Government Emails and Websites

 by the Daydreamer

I have been given an ultimatum by the self-acclaimed landlord of this corner of the worldwide web that I should collect my writing materials from wherever I stashed them and start using them again. He says he misses The Daydreamer’s Hallucinations, whatever good he sees in those random thoughts. The boy from Mpunga has, however, not said what exactly will befall me if at all I do not start scribbling whatever stuff these concoctions I have been taking these days as a local ‘vaccine’ against the notorious ‘Rona will bring out of my grey matter. Sometimes I wonder whether it is the fear of contracting the virus, the fear of a vaccine from some ‘bad’ billionaires, or the fear of dying that has driven one and all to places where blue gum trees are found in abundance. The scramble for lemons and ginger in the markets these days reminds me of my days with the landlord of this place somewhere, where we could scramble for VP. We’ll talk about that someday.

Anyway, I was saying the doctor anandigwira pakhosi this other day that I should get back to writing. And just a few days after that, he found a good occasion to lure me into scribbling something for him on one of his lazy Fridays like last week (and maybe today too). If you chance him, he will tell you about a crazy rule he has just manufactured to back himself up when he gets lazy. So here I am, standing in for the doc, who is probably out there somewhere steaming with whatever ‘natural remedy’ brew he has concocted today.

So on one random morning last week I woke up and did the usual checks on my phone and WhatsApp. A particular WhatsApp status caught my attention and I dared to open it. It was of a renowned social media commentator and lecturer in communication at ‘the college that God loved the most’. Most importantly, he is one of those I consider highly as my mentors. So, his was a question on why government officials in Malawi do not have official government of Malawi emails but instead go ahead to use Gmail or Yahoo! accounts.

I took a screenshot and posted it on my status while we discussed the issue further with the good lecturer in the background. But when the landlord of this place saw my post he thought it wise to coerce me into writing an article for him about that. So here I am, stating a little of the obvious, and some of my own hallucinations (and parroting some of what the good lecturer said in our conversation).

The twenty-first century is not called the Digital Age just for the fun of it. Meeting here on someone’s virtual plot is evidence enough of how technology has advanced in this age. Not long ago, these thoughts could only be published in print, but now I can even be posting stuff (whether full of sense or otherwise) every minute and you can access the same pronto. That’s not news.

When various technologies come, they usually take time to permeate into our country. This is usually because most of the times we take time to have the necessary infrastructure and gadgets in place. If you need an example, let me tell you that as you are reading this, somewhere on earth they have rolled out 5G and they are already thinking of something more than 5G. Where are we? Go find out, that’s your assignment.

So when emails came into being, we took time to adopt that technology. But let’s not belabor ourselves with what happened between then and now. I want us to talk about now. We now have almost all the necessary infrastructure in place, and the offices are crammed with gadgets. The question is, why do government officials almost never use emails we can recognize as official Government of Malawi emails.

In the line of duty, I have exchanged a good number of emails with various government officials of different ranks. Except for those from a few parastatals, I do not remember seeing an email that I would identify as a government of Malawi email. Otherwise, officials from various ministries indeed use Gmail, Yahoo!, and such other emails. Imagine the famed Brian Banda having an email like brianbanda@statehousemalawi.mw. Imagine receiving an email from, say, ps@minofhealth.mw. Cool, right? And very official. But here we are, exchanging official emails from addresses that sound like graffiti you’d find on a sorry wall of some primary school somewhere in Chiradzulu; biggyrich@gmail.com, richboy@ymail.com, mpungatopnigga@yahoo.com and so on.

The good lecturer told me that it was reported that there were about 144 IT gurus the government employed. I am tempted to say that other than sitting on their hands (which can be so mean), all they do is assist with photocopying documents and maybe installing WhatsApp in phones of the not-so-tech-savvy sapiens. Or you will have to tell me what it is that they do.

Have you ever visited any Government of Malawi Ministry website? Most of them are basic-looking plain sites that are there for the sake of being there. I am not saying they should be fancy looking, shiny graphics type of thing. No. But in 2021 we should not have a government website that looks like a blog (Richie’s here and mine elsewhere are better, if you ask me.)

Away from the outer look – the graphics – even the content is not usually up-to-date. I was assisting a colleague just this week to make a video that required some latest statistics which we thought a government website ought to have. But no, the latest they had was something from 2010. Ten years ago. Mind you, this is the kind of information we need to update on yearly basis. But remember we have tech heads that are almost the number of Jane Ansah’s Madando.

Since way back, as far back as I can remember, we have had ministers entrusted with the Information and Communication Technology. That part has always been on the move, from the Ministry of Education Science and Technology to Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology, to whatever the first citizen thinks of calling it at a particular time. But anyway, we have had ministers entrusted with manning ICT in this country, who in the end simply focus on the ‘I’: information, and discard the rest for you and me to figure out on ourselves. And even the ‘information’ is not usually information as we may know it, or would want it to be. It is simply one big machinery for manufacturing and distributing government propaganda and firefighting.

The point I am trying to make here on this borrowed plot is that we need to work more on the ICT part. Just have a look at the websites of institutions such as that of Chancellor College, MRA, and College of Medicine, for instance. Good looking and very vibrant. Those are the kinds of websites we should have for each and every ministry. In this day and age, we should shed off some of this paperwork and do things online. There are things we should find answers for online, forms we should download or even fill from the backseat of a Blantyre-Mangochi minibus. It should not be each and everything that we should have to endure standing on queues to get from face-to-face meetings with whoever holds a particular office. We can do better.

I hope someone reading this is, or knows, someone who can bring about the change we need. Now that the new government is modelling itself on some Western Government, I hope they will also work on the ICT sector. The emails and websites we are talking about here are just tips of the iceberg.