Malawi will continue looking at its neighbours – Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique – with admiration while its leadership uses the meagre public resources to live sumptuously.
Of course, a glance at the trends in Malawi for a long time now provides clear indicators of the linkage between the prevailing socio-economic hardships and policy decisions, and the pursuit of narrow interests by leaders over the last two decades years all so.
Pseudo economic policies and many other poorly designed ideas have been advanced since early 90s and, of course, Cashgate in more recent times, all these have brought the country down on its knees.
Agogo, simply put, our crop of leaders continue to be strong-armed by a blinding lack of vision for the country and its people into making decisions that least help the people they claim to best serve.
But touching on that, the culture of the majority of the citizenry failing to see any connection between public looted resources and their horrifying tax returns or very few considering themselves as serious taxpayers in any identifiable manner whatsoever or the majority of the citizenry just not seeing any connection between the quality of public service delivery and the balance books of available resources is still haunting the nation.
Elsewhere, for example, for the Khato Civils $500 million project to pump water from Lake Malawi to Lilongwe, a sense of understandable restiveness would have been bubbling over in the general populace necessitating stock-taking of the state of our collective conscience and a call for a revisit of our sense of commitment to productively serve the country and its people instead of selfishly serving our leaders’ self-interests.
But agogo, the knee-jerk response of our pseudo-leaders is to childishly jump at any seemingly free cutting-edge solutions thrown our way and tout them as the best thing that ever happened to the country and expend even more disproportionate resources attaching and ascribing themselves to the initiatives without any exhaustive analysis of the merits and demerits of the offered ‘assistance’.
Yes, it is not easy to write briefly about the capacity and achievements of Khato Civils and South Zambezi and their Chairperson Simbi Phiri’s contribution to the world through his colossal wealth.
Their marvellous works, we hear agogo, are scattered through political eras across the continent.
But it is important to underscore the fact that Phiri’s salivating attitude and supersonic speed towards this project have brought some questions to some individuals who are but citizens of the country.
One would like to think that Phiri’s monumental works are by-products of, among other things, transparent bidding processes and comprehensive and articulate feasibility study report.
Phiri, of course, has been civil enough and responded to these queries but only when he could reason circularly by quoting himself – the document he authored himself – as an authority.
Agogo, for records, the World Bank alone since 1966 has supported 126 projects worth $3 billion in Malawi’s water sector without any meaningful improvement in the sector.
Khato Civils project might see the same fate that other projects have seen before. That calls for close scrutiny and logical explanations.
But more worrisome, agogo, is the obvious insensitivity to the short-termism of most of our decisions – at all levels of the organs of the state, at all levels of government and all branches of government, in all their operations and in all exercise of all ‘public power’ by all public functionaries – that give minuscule weight to the broader and shared long-term considerations.
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