A Nation With An Issue of Blood!

In the book of St. Mark 5:25 onwards, is laid a classic story of a woman with an issue of blood, who made a resolution to call it ends by touching the helm of our LORD JESUS CHRIST. The story is quite old but best reflect the situation in which the nation is in. The nation has an internal bleeding situation which demands immediate intervention, should odds go to our favour. The disturbing fact with internal bleeding is that no one sees it, and as a result no one controls it, unless you resolve to do something about it. The pain is internal and out of reach for our nearest neighbour, unless one yells out. The treatment is complicated as it demands a careful surgical operation, with attention to detail as life and death is pinned to it. Seriously, our nation needs God’s intervention. I believe if our leaders could diagnose the pervasiveness of the problems, they would stop playing games, put on the gloves and knife, and start working out on our sickness.

We have a twin problem spelled out in one word, ‘inhumane’. Malawian’s long standing reputation is currently under stake subject to the increasing corruption cases and murderous reports on people with albinism, all for the hunt of the old bucks! All these are symphonic to moral delay and over-westernization. One cannot put pieces together on how we have metamorphosed into what we are today. I will only imagine, the very principles of humanity that have slowly been offloaded with the euphoria of democracy gnashing its jaws on our very conduct. How ironic that the nation that lodged over one million refugees from 1978 to 1986 cannot lodge its own endangered citizens from manslayers. How ironic that the same nation laments the killing of its citizens in foreign lands, Mozambique and South Africa, and spends over MK300 million for their repatriation, cannot create safe houses for its 10,000 population of endangered brothers and sisters, whose only crime is their deprivation of the protective skin pigment, melanin.

The brutal witch-hunt for our beloved brothers and sisters born with albinism has been systemic and orchestrated by ambitious and lucratic networks too pervasive to be detected by our law enforcers. So far, by the time of publishing this blog, 17 people with albinism had been murdered in cold-blood, 66 additional people born with albinism abducted without trace, we can only assume the worst, and 28 others have been denied ‘resting-in-peace’ in quest of the millions their bones and body parts can award. Mathematically, the country has been merciless to over 111 bodies of people born with albinism, whose parts have been distributed to places, bargained and sold, without any conscience, in search for a dollar. As if that is enough, many of them have suffered insults, dubbed names, such as ‘mobile money’, ‘walking corpes’ by vendors in our townships and suburbs. This trend at which things are unfolding is an exact duplication of the Rwandan genocide, with a slow motion button placed on remote control. Photos of bones, body parts and all are shared on Whatsapp, and yet, the law-enforcers are simply providing assurance of a better day. The nation has turned too savagery reminiscent to the depictions of ‘The Lord of Flies’ novel which exposes the animalistic passion of a human heart. I have always doubted whether a man would on his own volition abduct another person without having established a market opportunity elsewhere. I have no word to describe the fate and the reputation we have carried abroad for our reluctance to curb this stench once and for all. On one occasion an officer was reported to have connived with murders to offer them an escape from the arms of the law at five hundred thousand Malawi Kwacha (MK500,000), a development which is quite lamentable and very inhuman. We probably have for long disregarded our friends born albinism as less humans, and denied them their right to life. I don’t believe that this brutal surge against people with albinism is born out of poverty, but I have all reasons to believe it as a result of our evil passions, cushioned by the lust for money and value-eroded culture. We have turned into beasts, probably worse than beasts.

The government must act and act now. The president’s call for ‘shoot on sight’ is highly applauded and more should be done. If we all mobilise ourselves in search for these networks, we can kill the plant at its bud. If all our border districts were heavily secured, and whistle-blowers could be placed in strategic positions, we could have dealt this issue once and for all. If we can eliminate the myths in our minds that riches come through the abductions and murders of albinos, and if we can all collectively work to combat this evil among us, I see Malawi rescuing itself from the present peril. The sentences that the courts are producing against the perpetrators of these barbarous acts are both provocative and unconvincing.  They are an expression of whether justice is the vision of our judiciary or not. In one case, a convict was sentenced to ‘four’ years for trading with bones of an albino and another case a magistrate sentenced to 17 years two convict for murdering albinos, dismembering their bodies and conspiring to trade them for a fortune. Putting each other in perspective, Bernard Madoff, a former Nasdaq chairman ‘conman’ was sentenced to 150 years for swindling over 65 billion dollars through fake policies and products. A Former Mayor of Blantyre City, John Chikakwiya was sentenced to three years and two months for stealing 6,000 dollars meant for road construction, yet a former Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Tourism, Triza Namathanga Senzani, bagged a decent three year jail sentence for swindling over 100,000 dollars through the same Malawian courts. Even after the same courts had sentenced Steven Monjeza, a two year sentence for stealing a phone, and a seven year sentence to a Form Four student for forcing sex on his girlfriend who was a minor. Surely, there is something intrinsically wrong with our judiciary system! I need to be schooled on how these sentences are arrived at. There are countless examples of double standards with our courts and should this continue I stand back but wonder whether it is justice or something else being pursued by our judiciary system.

If the government wishes to curb this malpractice, then I believe that the government must necessitate that sentences given by our courts against those who commit such heinous acts are proportionate to their acts. The murderers are worse than human beings, in expression of one Comrade Mugabe, when you reach the level of butchering another fellow being, dismembering his or her breasts, head, limbs, and other private parts for economic gains, you cannot qualify to be called a human being. In other words, we oftentimes demonize the former German Nazi Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, who for a schizophrenic driven agenda, systematically exterminated 6 million Jews, for their hair, golden teeth and national pride, but history will have no mercy on us categorizing us as merciless as Hitler if we do not deal with this evil once and for all.

To pin it together with the corrupt practices in our justice system, where law enforcers shield perpetrators at a fee and where the courts give lenient sentences to convicts, is beyond our imagination. As a nation, we surely are bleeding from inside, and the longer we caress this internal bleeding, the greater the chances for a national fatality.

Maize, Malice and Malawians

This is the trailblazer blog for the year, 2016, a new year that preceded another year full of unprecedented events, the floods that had hit several of our areas, tumbling foreign exchange rate even when the tobacco market was open, an unjustifiably high bill for our 51st Anniversary Independence celebrations, a year which saw promises denied, spite of murderous armed robberies, a couple of fire razes of warehouses, shops, markets and flea-markets. 2015 was not all a bad year, though, we had record-breaking outstanding performance of the Malawian Queens at the world stage of netball, and their counterpart football outfit, the Flames, proved a point by bringing home a COSAFA shield. What worries us are not what has come to pass, but the level of readiness to what is to come.

The three worrisome matters, are contained in the title of this blog, the maize, malice and Malawians. I will endeavor to break down why the matters matter, and disprove the point that it is not the mere fact that they all start with 'M' that make them significant, or would it be.

Maize, is the staple food of the nation, to the extent that maize is the country's food security indicator. During the growing season, 2006/07, the country's food security levels skyrocketed to 3.2 million metric tonnes, thanks to the farm input subsidy programme (FISP) that had been resisted by the donors in its maiden financial year. The country could for the first time manage to export 391,255 metric tonnes of maize, after it had exported only 1,160 metric tonnes of maize the previous year. The country was dubbed a 'food-basket' in the Southern Region of Africa, by experts from the Forum for Food Security in Southern Africa (FFSSA). However, the success story was short-lived after the programme was dogged by perennial anomalies ranging from nepotism, coupons used as vote-buying mechanisms, corruption, failure to exercise transparency in the award of contracts, and all. The governments paid little or no attention in addressing these perennial anomalies, to the extent that it became no news to catch vendors selling FISP-branded bags of fertilizers on the black market. Based on the recent reports from Consumers Association of Malawi (CAMA), the country's 10 FISP programme had consumed a mammoth MK 280 billion in budgetary allocation without a trophy to glory of. The country remains vulnerable to food insecurity, at the pity of erratic rainfall distribution which is hugely affected by the growing climate change evils, such as El-Ninos, producing floods and dry-spells. The nation has not yet found a workable solution to its long-debated food diversification programme on the ground, as masses continue to depend on maize year in, year out. The greenbelt irrigation project remains a decorated policy on paper with little replications on the ground. On a sad note, the tractors procured for the greenbelt irrigation scheme remain static at the warehouse of the country's PVHO, without any MP or lobby-groups making noises to get them moving. One can easily witness a gross posteriority not by our leaders only, but by everyone from policy-makers to the least on the ground. I will not be afraid to say that we have our priorities upside down, spending most of our energies on the call to amend 'homosexuality codes' as though it was the central feature keeping our economy jet-lagging!

Now, allow me fellow citizens to move to the next area of concern, which is malice. Malice is a term that stands for 'feeling a need to see others suffer' or a 'quality of threatening evil'. Malice is not one of the infamous terms in our national anthem, but lately, I have been contemplating that should the need to revisit it grow stronger, the term should find its way into one of the stanzas. The most malicious society would be the one with no regard to other people's welfare, especially strangers, foreigners and nationals. While other societies are as malicious as can be to foreigners, Malawian society's malice is rather awkwardly pointed inward. the trend of the political climate in Malawi. The trends of political opportunism in the appointment of Vice Presidents is one classic example, where soon after the election, a characteristic enmity emerges, the lack of succession plans in most political parties is another dominating example, in almost all political parties in the nation, failure to relinquish political powers and pointless fragmentation in parties subject to lack of unity, is a fruit of malice. The nation remains heavily populated in terms of both its citizens and political parties, the opposition political parties are horses with the same colours, without distinctive political ideologies, and the nature of malice is infectious down to the business fraternity and the common man on the ground, mimicking my last blog, 'A Country is as Good as its Leadership'.

On the last point, Malawians, I would like to throw the closet open, in case someday someone shall read this blog and appreciate the nature of a country, the author once lived in. Malawians have to shoulder all the blame for not living up to the expectations of engineering the nation to its former days of glory. The people's greed and need for a fast-buck has turned us into the deep abyss of thievery, an extreme act of violence against our future generations. We have become very individualistic and materialistic, forming platonic islands which we seek to entrench unspeakable wealth. We pant for the next dollar, but take no regard to legacy. We justify acts of unspeakable evils for the next dollar. It was unimaginable that Malawians had the audacity of massacring innocent lives, I mean people living with albinism, exhuming their bodies, should they fail to get hold of them, and relentlessly hacking foreigners to grab their hard-earned properties. We have over time grown into a monstrous creature that shamelessly refuses to repent. I would only shed crocodile tears for the calamities that is bouncing back on us. The national pride resides in our ability to stamp out the evils among us and stand for the common cause, the welfare of all, not specific personalities. Polar politicization has obviously handicapped our thinking in a way that we are quick to judge the wrongs of political leaders across the lane, than we are of our own. As bwande always put it, we remain amazing creatures on earth.

In conclusion, I will be tempted to include what in one instance with a good friend of mine from church concluded. Malawi does not belong to anyone but us, and we are therefore unequivocally to blame for the mess we have given it. As the year of monkeys unfolds, we better pray God forgive us for the crimes we committed one to another and seek widsom from the Most High. We need a mental revolution and ownership of the state of being. We need to emigrate a culture of legacy and possible, it may take another Ernesto Guevara's form of campaign, taking the dross away from the grey matter. We don't need a lot of foreign aid, we need a lot of foreign exchange in the form of trade! We need revolutionize thinking to unearth the massive wealth that lies underneath the ground. 'Chuma chili nthaka' means more that what we have literally thought it meant!

A Country is as Good as its Leadership

Behaviour has in a long run been linked to one’s upbringing. This assertion has surprisingly not developed keen interest in research to identify whether behaviour and upbringing pose an intricate cause-effect relationship, probably since it is obvious that one’s upbringing contributes explicably to one’s character. But wait a minute, this could be a hasty generalization fallacy, as some have been reported to demonstrate changed behaviour out of exposure rather than upbringing. May be the affinity to one’s upbringing would overwrite peer pressure to change one’s behaviour. We all appreciate the fact that one’s upbringing is a subject of parental control and it is therefore inevitable to conclude that ‘a house is as good as its leaders’. Leaving the debate of nurture versus nature to the sociological discourse, I am compelled to discuss the ‘fact’ that a country is as good as its leadership. I would rather reluctantly endorse it as a fact, in the historical and political landscape’s sense and not in scientific sense.

Africa is one such continent that showcases the ‘truth’ about this assertion. Statistically speaking Africa has been the hub of all kinds of development and natural resources. The African continent is renowned for its natural deposits. According to the African Natural Resource Centre (2015) the continent account for 30% of the world’s minerals and about 10% and 8% of oil and gas resources respectively. Following this truth, Africa has the second largest tropical forest in the world. The continent has vast fishing resources added to the above, with the largest lake in the world, Lake Victoria generating over $600 million every year. According to the National Geographic the continent produced over 483 tons of gold in 2008, accounting to 22% of the world gold production. There is a lot of wealth this continent has comparative to other continents such as Europe and South America. Realistically, the continent has faced a couple of setbacks, citing colonialism and slavery, which have robbed it of ‘part of its’ potential for world dominance in development. I wish to state that this robbed the continent ‘a part’ not all, sadly the continent continues to lag behind in terms of economic development. The largest number of countries that lag behind UNDP human development index and World Bank world development index come from Africa.

Slavery and Colonialism truly are partially to blame but the African continent is dogged by leadership with nothing to showcase but poor governance, corruption and cronyism. The continent has seen the richest presidents in the world to say the least. According to Ibrahim Index, 21 out of 54 countries in the continent have deteriorated in terms of governance, which includes Malawi. The truth is a country is as good as its leadership. Where leadership fails, the country also fails. Now this takes me to the very subject of our discussion, and I will focus on my country Malawi.

The nation is salvaged by reports on failure to follow the agreed budgetary lines for the country to be a recipient of the Extension Credit Facility (ECF) from IMF. These reports also come in the light of the understanding of the rationale behind a number of cuts outlined in the new public reforms in social service delivery in the sectors of education, agriculture, health and social welfare, subject to the limited resources. All these developments spell doom to the plight of the nationals in the nation which is on its economic bedrock and approaching the looming epicentre of food shortage. These developments beg the following questions: Does the Malawi government consider good governance as a priority? Does the leadership of the nation share the economic hardship of its citizens? Is the fight against corruption a rhetoric PR gimmick or is it a cause to be achieved? Is this the outlined agenda of the current DPP government for national development? How should the government promote its development agenda in the face of the challenges it is facing? The country’s performance is accredited to its leadership, whether good performance or poor performance. The country requires a change of thinking, a revolutionary development agenda, and a divorce-filing from its old politics. Someone once said, you cannot continue doing the things the same way and expect different results. I would like to pinpoint the kind of leadership that is needful for the country to forge forward.

1. Selfless Leadership

A selfless leadership is the leadership that aspires the best in others before aspiring the best in itself. Doug Dickerson comments the following on selfless leadership: ‘the emergence of selfless leadership begins with this fundamental principle: until you empower your people, [you are only a spectator]. When they are empowered, they can produce, achieve and succeed’. John Maxwell, another renowned leadership scholar once stated of the difficulty it is of finding common ground with others if the only person focused on is oneself. The disaster that the African continent has faced, creating more casualties that war, and famine combined, in fact it is the derivative of the two, is selfish, self-centred leadership and governance. African leaders have amassed themselves wealth with a proportionate percentage of their countries’ GDPs. The desire to lead should be the desire to take ‘a people’ or ‘a nation’ from one place to another place. If there is not consideration for promoting, uplifting, or progressing from one level to the next level, the activity of leadership throws into pieces the very concept of leadership.

2. Visionary Leadership

Africa continent remains where it is for lack of vision and visionary leadership. In fact, the continent is a recipient to imported strategic visions in exchange for aid. The Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) have only worked retrogressively to the developmental interests of the continent, one would put it. But besides the fact that SAPs and other global strategies do not reflect African interests, one wonders why domestic policies and strategies have not created opening for wealth and job creation in Malawi. As I was writing this article, news had started circulating that the Ministry of Health will not afford to employ 51 medical doctors for lack of financial resources. The country is lagging behind in terms of provision of medical services, with intermittent medical supply shortages and technical expertise. The last thing the nation would do is to frustrate the very efforts it is creating by denying to accord employment opportunities to the already trained medical doctors. The country’s strategic vision is seen off-track dogged by the rampant and unchecked corrupt practices. As a nation, we need a clear strategy that will have allocated resources, to say the least. The last corruption scandal has taken a snail’s pace, with only four court cases reaching their conclusion, owing to the missing case files, and minimal funding to the anti-graft bodies such as Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Judiciary System. There is surely a high tower responsibility to the current government to put bolts and nuts together to make a sound impression to the donor community of its commitment to fighting corruption. It is not a responsibility to the faint-hearted. Resources that have been used for catering the bloated entourage should have been saved for other rather prudent purposes. The nation needs vision and strategy which will definitely shake the dogmatic quest for self-aggrandizement and encourage economic patriotism.

3. Progressive leadership

We need a progressive leadership, a leadership that is styled in self-belief and over-reliance on self-potential for development. Malawi needs progressive mindedness. Country needs a developmental statesmanship with a view for the generations to come. We all read history about Joseph Stalin’s five year plans, which much as he was a dictator, and I don’t commend him for that, he readied his country for the second world war, both in terms of machinery, weaponry and manpower. This country needs to apply the theory of developmental state which according to many scholars such as Joseph Stiglitz, and Adrian Leftwich, is a state that benefits from the combination of private business advancements with a sizable state control which interface in a mutually beneficial pattern. It is a terms, judging from the one who coined it, Chalmers Johnson, in his book, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, ‘a shorthand for the seamless web of political, bureaucratic, and moneyed influences that structures economic life in capitalist Northeast Asia’. In fact, being a developmental state, is the only survivor jacket in the current global 'economic free-fall' that has an impeccable guarantee of a safe landing. The country requires concerting its energies on sacrificial approaches to making Malawi graduate from being a primary producer into an industrialized secondary producer, and this can only be done through progressive leadership. So far, I remain unconvinced on whether we are on track with this goal.

Lastly, the nation remains on its economic sickbed and it frustrates the heart that strategies on paper remain on paper, probably until a wake-up call hits us and shake us a little bit from our economic dogmatic slumber. We need better leadership to steer this nation towards unexplored waters, and the current leadership has an uphill task to demonstrate this leadership, or sooner or later the nation may render it expendable. 

Being effective in our trade is something with less rhetoric conquest but more undeniable action

Muhammad Ali remains one of the greatest boxers to ever grace the boxing ring. He once was quoted as saying: “I hated every minute I was training, but I said: ‘Dont quit, suffer now and live the rest of your life as champion’”. He surely has lived as champion, honoured by the whole boxing fraternity. He has been every effective. The very definition of effectiveness creates a contestation. Some regard it as the measure of output regardless of the quantity of input, while others view it as capacity to produce the intended results. In all sense of the contestation, effectiveness has more to do with the outcome than the defence of it. The only measure we have to the government is not how defensively articulate it has been to its critics, but how it has delivered. 

The previous governments have been obsessively recruiting spin-doctors and media experts to cover up their mediocrity. Once the government starts hunting around for the scribes, the intellectual mass, and completely ignores and suppresses public opinion and advice, know that the writing is on the wall, we will have another mediocre government. Recent developments in Malawi, have prompted me to pick up a pen and write. The first is the killings of our friends with albinism, the second is the introduction of user fees in our public hospitals, and the third is the rumour of the appointment of a second vice president.

To begin with, the killing of our brothers and sisters born with albinism. I have been shocked at how merciless we are as a society to the plight of other people. It is bizarre that poverty can throw us to the level of dogs, who could munch on another dead dog. Two things that come to my mind is that there is no way, such merciless killings would get to this extent if the communities and government had relentlessly resisted and tackled it. The second is that the attitude of pointing fingers in this era, should be replace with an attitude of doing something about it. I will propose that the community, the police and the government do something to tract down these killers. But killing a killer is not solving the crime in this situation. We need to capture the whole syndicate. This is a network of buyers of human parts and the whole supply chain. I am of the opinion that there are some greedy, evil tycoons, financing the whole saga, and these could be within and without our boundaries. It is our responsibility as a community to supply the information to the law enforcers on these things and the law enforcers act. Where the law enforcers, Police, do not seem to be acting, then we have a very serious problem. What we need is not rhetoric what we need is action. We need to be implementing what we devise.

On the second matter of introduction of user fees in our public hospitals, I believe it is a very inhuman idea that will not improve the conditions of our country but severe it, to say the least. The Ministry of Health, should consult the National Statistical Office (NSO) first before launching the policy. The sad reality gripping our fellow Malawians and rural populations, is that they have to be cushioned, most of them can barely afford a packet of sugar. It is believed that the recent findings from the World Bank, was based on the GDP per capita, where Malawi has or had a GDP per capita of 262 US dollars. Any person who would wish to divide that GDP per capita to the number of days in a year will reach at a nerve-wrecking figure of less than a dollar a day. Truth be told on average most Malawians are living on a less than a dollar a day. The conditions in the rural areas are dire, the fact that they have just been recently hit by the natural disaster, makes them more vulnerable and poorer than before. So the government should devise another means of cushioning these rural masses, especially where the tax regime is already hitting them even harder, where the plight of their livelihood solely depends on rain-fed agriculture, where the state of hospital infrastructure is close to oblivion, where the availability of medication is not guaranteed, where the condition of roads are very bad, the distance to and from the hospital, general hospital, or even a health facility is appallingly long, and much more, where most of the sick have to walk these long  distances, and support other areas of their livelihood. Introducing a fee of MK1,500 for every sick accessing medical services at the health centre, hospital and other clinics, is as good as nipping the majority poor Malawians off the bud. I believe heads can bang at the capital hill on alternative measures to meet their medical requirements.

On the recent reports of the suggested appointment of a second vice president, I want to have myself believe that it is a mere rumour. It is an obvious means of draining the resources from an already economically weakened government. The political and economic repercussions of such a decision are unfathomable. We need to carefully place the country on an economic footing that will enable it flourish, instead of working on means of appeasing other political echelons.

In conclusion, the practice of mere talking has not throughout history yielded results beyond those who walked the talk. An example is given of a former Iraq Minister of Information during the 2003 Iraq Invasion, that he talked a lot on Iraq winning the war, when in fact they were losing it. The government must walk the talk in some of these things to improve our societies. Servant leadership is one concept that needs walking the talking. Good governance, improved security, and accessible health services and other social services are its close cousins, for effective government performance. They are hard to implement and painful at times, but the end result is a prosperous, better Malawi!