“How time flies” – so goes the cliché. But is it a lie? Time has proven to have wings and many are moments we realise that we have just wasted this precious resource – that it has flown away. In our case, it seems like yesterday that we went to the polls to usher in a new regime – the Tonse Alliance. We had just emerged from the streets; having fought a party we thought was the reason for our stagnation. We were pregnant with hope, and we envisioned some idyllic future. Now it has been five years since we gave the robes to the new powers, and we are still stuck where we were.
What has happened (or not happened) in these five years of an experimental regime should tell us that our mini-revolution in 2020 did not touch on things that matter. we may have been too angry from our affliction that we targeted individuals instead of directing our gaze to the systems and practices that keep us in poverty and underdevelopment. Of course, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had individuals who proudly wore gowns of impunity and had to go, but maybe we forgot that these people were part of a system that has been designed to benefit them and not us. It is not surprising then that the Tonse Alliance has failed to deliver, since it is a part of that system.
Overtime, critical Malawians have come to realize that, whether they are in government or in opposition, our politicians are part of the same system. Politics in Malawi has proven to be a money-spinning contest for politicians. These people come into the game to win and not to benefit Malawians. What makes their hearts race and burn for power is not the nauseating state of our economy or the avoidable deaths of our people. Malawian politicians want the positions they fight for simply because they want to control the pots of gold that only those in power have access to. It is not about ending poverty or developing this country. For them, it is all about who gets to eat the biggest piece of meat.
Realizing this, we should not be surprised when regime after regime continue with systems that have never benefited ordinary Malawians. We are talking about programs like the Farm Input Subsidy Programme, which came in the guise of replacing the Affordable Inputs Programme. In essence, this is the same programme that has been running for years and has not addressed the problem of hunger it was designed to mitigate. These are programs that politicians design in order to amass votes, and nothing else. Each year, the same poor farmers “benefit” from this program and end up crying out for help when hunger strikes them. Our politicians are too witty that they deliberately inculcated a spirit of dependency in Malawians who now think they cannot live without handouts.
The Constituency Development Fund (CDF), which has recently become even more contentious following a court ruling that stops Members of Parliament from controlling funds, is also one of the programs that have not benefitted Malawians. At face value, the CDF seems to be a jackpot for impoverished constituents who would benefit from their MPs’ wise allocation of resources for development. But the truth is that time has proven that these resources are used in mysterious ways and the country remains where it was decades ago. The money allocated to this program is not for ordinary citizens, but for politicians. This is why the regime is fighting the court ruling because the real beneficiaries of CDF are about to lose out in the new arrangement where local councils have been given the power to control resources.
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What keeps us down as a country is not lack of resources. We have everything that should see us improve, albeit slowly, but our biggest challenge is misplaced priorities and perverted appetites. This greed and hunger for public resources seems to be a postcolonial ailment that most African politicians are failing to recover from. There is also this need in our politicians to appear as princes and princesses in shining armor. They want to play saviors before people they are failing to serve. And what do they do? They steal. Our economic stagnation is deeply rooted in the system. In September, we must focus on changing how we do things.
