Some things do not require us to pay for them with our own blood.<\/p>\n
Granted, nationalists purchased our liberties at a very high price, sometimes drowning in their own blood after colonialists cruelly cut them off from the face of the earth. This, though, does not mean blood has become the new currency; especially after Malawians voted for multiparty politics in 1994.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, this seems to be the case in Malawi, where lives continue to be pointlessly lost.<\/p>\n
The health sector has, for example, been bleeding due to preventable issues such as shortage of drugs, poor remuneration for those who toil to save lives in the sector. Consequently, citizens continue to lose their lives needlessly, which is to say they pay for poor service delivery with their own blood.<\/p>\n
Which brings us to the issue of the needless death of four innocent children in Zomba District last week. Feeling short-changed on the issue of service provision, community members tried to play the good citizen by mobilising local resources and constructing a school block\u2014 sadly with disastrous consequences.<\/p>\n
A wall fell on learners who, intent on creating a future they would be proud of, sustained various degrees of injuries while four, who had nothing to do with policy negligence, spilled their blood on the scene of the accident and died a needless death.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, the community members have constrained themselves, instead of being violently distempered by descending on those whose negligence cost the nation dear lives. Perhaps taking advantage of that, stakeholders such as Cabinet ministers, Department of Disaster Management Affairs officials, Civil Society Education Coalition leaders and Parliamentary Committee on Education members have flocked to the scene of what qualifies to be the verdict of failure by duty-bearers, namely Nantchengwa Primary School.<\/p>\n
We think it is too late to pretend to be concerned when, all along, civil society organisations (CSOs), the Legislature, the Executive, among others, have been paying a blind eye to the plight of learners in this country.<\/p>\n
To begin with, CSOs seem obsessed with advocacy, forgetting that they can, from time to time, show the government how things should be done by setting to work on the ground.<\/p>\n
As for parliamentary committees, you have failed Malawians big time by failing to hold the government accountable through formulation of requisite legislation.<\/p>\n
As for the Executive arm of the government, it is high time it discarded lopsided policies and embraced policies that will translate into positive results on the ground. We know you have not been as steadfast in the Nantchengwa issue because your wards are in expensive private schools.<\/p>\n
Let us remember that what goes around comes around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some things do not require us to pay for them with our own blood. Granted, nationalists purchased our liberties at a very high price, sometimes drowning in their own blood after colonialists cruelly cut them off from the face of the earth. This, though, does not mean blood has become the new currency; especially after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":42927,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66714,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66711\/revisions\/66714"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}