Random Thoughts on Development

It's a hot Saturday on the serving.

This week, the whole is of Malawi’s poverty gold medal resurfaced. Our GDP turned out to be less than that of all the war-torn and disaster (and pretty much any other country that is disadvantaged, really) on the globe. We are leading the line when it comes to the inverse of prosperity and the realization of this fact has ignited a whole lot of reactions, just like any other time.

The biggest and scariest blaming and demeaning finger has of course pointed to those at the helm of the government. The president and his henchmen have had an unusually high dose of insults in the recent days following the release of this World Bank report of whatever on Earth they call it. That is usual and not interesting, but the reason I am talking about this is one reaction which I saw from a couple of esteemed cyber-friends of mine.

As I said, the response of these friends of mine was pretty interesting. It was so interesting to the extent of pointing the blaming finger within the country they decided to fault the World Bank of not being objective in deciding who to honor with the global poverty crown, an argument I found to be a bit faulty for two reasons. The first reason was the mere fact that the World Bank did not say that we are poor. We said that ourselves when we saw our name being first from the bottom when the GDPs were listed. We may have been right for some reason, anyway, but we shouldn’t put it on the World Bank, I think. Weak argument. Even I agree with you.

The other reason for which I do not agree with the way people responded to this thing was that people were saying the World Bank did not include the likes of the peace we have (Peace Index) and the natural resources that we have before labeling us poor. Well, if you think of it, my other argument still suffices and on a more solid note, those things cannot be used as an objective measure of a country’s prosperity. I am not trying to say that I would rather stay in Alleppo Syria in the midst of the bombing, so long as their GDP is higher than ours. My main point is just that the peace and natural resources we have are what we can call the potential for prosperity and not prosperity, per se. So long as they are not used to their fullest, let us let them be and exclude them when we are counting our blessings. What is a resource if it cannot add value life, anyway? We might as well consider our continuous power outages when calculating how rich or poor we are.

While I do not like talking ill about my country for the fear of being called a pessimist (and of course because I see some potential in it), I think it is good to call a spade a spade when it comes to some issues. I would just like to bring some issues to light to those who are questioning the objectivity of those of us who maintain that the country is poor, and this will be based purely on the living conditions of the wandu of this country, or at least a majority of them.

There is no single day that passes without seeing someone posting about how ESCOM has frustrated their plans by taking out power  when they had things to do with is or rather how someone is scared just because the guys have not adhered to their  blackout schedule and have left the power on for too long. Some areas have stayed for years without running water and they will probably be scared to death when they see water run in their taps. Our road network in townships is very poor and the feeder roads in our rural areas hardly get maintained. In other words, our country runs on systems that were designed in 1980 when the population was less than a third of what it is in the present day. People have sat in offices and strategic meetings at Sunbird Nkopola in the name of improving the systems the country is run on only to come out with different wordings for the very same excuses they feed us with.
The agri-based economy called Malawi is struggling to produce enough to feed its own and ending up sending an SOS to donors for donation in the face of hunger. The solution is ending up being importing tones of food from neighboring countries when we could find a lasting solution through other means that are ironically written in some policy book that is gathering dust at Capitol Hill. I will leave it there for the reader to add their own complaints, but in summary, the country is just messed up.

Someone will probably text me and tell me that I do not need to focus on what the country is supposed to give to me, but rather what I can give to the country. If you were planning on doing that, please don’t. Ungandiyankhulitse molakwika. Everybody who sees things with the objective eye knows that the situation in the country is counter-productive and this thing of giving to the country is pretty impossible to a greater extent.

Giving back to the nation depends on what you have. If others are preaching the gospel of entrepreneurship and think that they can give to the nation through that, well, so be it. I was trained for 6 years at the College of Medicine to be a doctor and to me the primary definition of giving back means going into some hospital named after a British Queen and sticking needles into sick people to make them better. The very government of the country you are saying I should give back to is denying me the opportunity to do so just as it has done with teachers, nurses and many other professionals in the country. Counter-productive!

What saddens me is that we have nicely laid out policy documents sitting in the offices of those who are supposed to be fixing this country. Munaiona Vision 2020 inu? We have heard people admitting that there is corruption in the country. There is probably a whole act in our legal circus on how to curb corruption, but someone is failing to adhere to that for reasons we all know. There are good policies governing fair trade, agriculture, tourism, energy and pretty much every other thing we are struggling with today. That convinces me that people who need to know these things know them and they just do not want to use them. That is how tricky the situation is.

You have probably heard some people saying that Malawi will never develop. The only point at which I agree with them is the point at which we say Malawi is an underdeveloped (and not developing, you people) nation, but in case you were wondering why they say that, the people who are custodians of development in this country do not care about both the present and future of this country. My opinion? Malawi may yet have a chance, but do not expect it to get a face-lifting from within the gafment. It will take a reasonable number working from without to improve the livelihoods of the people… Otherwise some of things are deliberate.

Whether we will join those who are stagnating development is for us to decide, but I think it is time we became a part of the solution as opposed to being part of the problem, which most of us are, anyway.

I am drafting plans for a Solar Field in Lunzu. Zinachitika dzulo zija sizoona.