Two related episodes of death, 30 kilometres apart, in which seven people, including four children, have died hit us as a nation during the past 10 days.<\/p>\n
The first bout of death was in Zomba where four children perished after a wall, of what the community thought was a school block, fell on them. They were all in Standard Three at Natchengwa Primary School.<\/p>\n
Thirty kilometres away in Blantyre on Sunday, three adults also tragically died after the scaffold they were using as they put up a new bill board collapsed. They fell on a live wire of electricity which immediately electrocuted them.<\/p>\n
Both cases were sudden and agonising. But this is not the only common feature.<\/p>\n
The other commonality is that all the seven lost souls were poor and they died in circumstances that were avoidable, especially if we were a country that knows what it is doing and has leaders that are leading us on a correct path.<\/p>\n
Let me start with the kids in Zomba. These died because they were brought into this world by poor families in rural Zomba.<\/p>\n
All Education Minister Bright Msaka could say during their funeral in Zomba is that the government has learnt a bitter lesson from the tragedy and that it would now take inspection of school blocks seriously to avoid such tragedies.<\/p>\n
Msaka did not forget to apportion and spread blame around, telling mourners that construction of school blocks lies in the hands of councils.<\/p>\n
Of course, this is a load of rubbish and nothing more than a blatant shedding of crocodile tears.<\/p>\n
The truth of the matter is that we are a country that is damned and our priorities are upside down.<\/p>\n
Within those lopsided priorities, the lot of the poor people in both the rural and urban areas is the least and they will continue to perish like tsetse flies of Kasungu National Park.<\/p>\n
We, as citizens, have been duped to believe that the Ministry of Education gets the lion\u2019s share of the national budget.<\/p>\n
What has been cleverly kept away from us is how much of the monies in that budget really go down to the ground and to the classroom.<\/p>\n
The reality is that most of it gets stolen and that is why the then K187 million scandal of 1999 under the UDF government haunts us today. That time, politicians hastily registered construction companies with a view to siphon money from the ministry to build school blocks which they did not.<\/p>\n
This is still happening but on grander scale than in 1999.<\/p>\n
The results are what we are seeing today. Kids who did not choose to be born to poor parents in rural areas are perishing in broad day light.<\/p>\n
After the money from the Education ministry is stolen, the rest is shared among officers in form of night allowances for travel. Therefore, what Msaka is saying, that government has learnt a lesson and will intensify inspection tours of school blocks is one hell of a blue fat lie.<\/p>\n
His officers would rather go to Mangochi to air-conditioned rooms for unending conferences that have a little bearing on what is happening on the ground and the classroom, especially in rural areas.<\/p>\n
As for the Shoprite death of three poor souls, my engineer friend tells me scaffolding is not done willy-nilly as it is specialised engineering.<\/p>\n
In countries where they have leaders in charge of people\u2019s welfare, those behind it are licenced annually and their skill levels are examined regularly.<\/p>\n
My friend told me that, during the years gone by, there was an engineering firm in Blantyre that offered professional scaffolding services to clients putting up things such as buildings and safety was of paramount importance.<\/p>\n
Today, nobody talks about this. Scaffolds of blue gum poles or from bamboos are the order of the day in construction sites as safety of poor, desperate souls is relegated to somewhere.<\/p>\n
It is clear nobody bothered to talk about safety before the accident that claimed three lives as a result of electrocution in Blantyre.<\/p>\n
After all, these were mere casual labourers and those that hired them did not even know their full names and where they came from.<\/p>\n
They were poor people.<\/p>\n
As for our leaders, things such as these are the last on their minds.<\/p>\n
While poor people are perishing in avoidable circumstances in schools, hospitals, on the roads and God-knows- where else, they do not mind. They would rather live larger than life lives in opulence and unbridled luxury.<\/p>\n
These luxuries manifest themselves in large barricaded houses and big eight-cylinder vehicles that guzzle fuel as if we have oil wells right here in Malawi.<\/p>\n
All these things our leaders do in full oblivion of what is happening on the ground.<\/p>\n
They do not desire to account for this criminality and they have found ways of perpetually subjecting the population to the greatest lie that all is well and that the future is good.<\/p>\n
When accidents happen, they rush to issue press statements that say nothing.<\/p>\n
They offer to shoulder full funeral expenses, all with a view to make the citizens forget their tragedies quickly when they should have been responsible enough by avoiding the death in the first place.<\/p>\n
It is all crocodile tears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two related episodes of death, 30 kilometres apart, in which seven people, including four children, have died hit us as a nation during the past 10 days. The first bout of death was in Zomba where four children perished after a wall, of what the community thought was a school block, fell on them. They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20131,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66936","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\/66936","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=66936"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66939,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66936\/revisions\/66939"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}