Of late, a lot of people on social media platforms have been commenting that Malawi is a very interesting place to live in.
We are never short of drama and each day that you wake up alive, you are more likely to hear some news that is just ridiculous.
While the entertainment in those stories serves to soothe minds from the burns of affliction, most of the times, news that makes us laugh ought to make us rage. The folly that we laugh at sometimes borders on very serious issues that call for our anger and not laughter.
For a long time, we have been living in mediocre state of affairs. It seems that only very few people are serious enough in this country such that even State institutions are run as playgrounds where anything goes and nobody is responsible for the mud and the dust.
Take for example, the Road Traffic Directorate, the State broadcaster, and the Immigration Department. These are institutions that we expect to perform at their highest capacity, but they have become horrible symbols of how things are done in this country, even at the highest level.
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Lack of seriousness and sheer negligence are in the DNA of government institutions in Malawi.
To put matters into perspective, for more than a year, Malawians have been failing to access drivers’ licence cards and they have been driving using some letters that look like school reports.
At first, the excuse was the scarcity of forex, but then the school reports were normalised. In any country worth its name, this problem shouldn’t have lasted more than a month, but we are in Malawi where mediocrity reigns.
Nobody seemed to be bothered on the implications of using a paper for a licence for drivers who operate outside this country.
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You can just imagine a Malawian truck driver being asked to produce a license in Johannesburg and they take out a letter from the directorate. But we don’t think that far. The minds of our decision makers are as narrow as the contours of our country.
It is a similar kind of shame, or even worse, that we are facing with the mess at the Department of Immigration.
For weeks now, we have been in this endless saga in which citizens cannot get new passports or renew their old ones because the system there is corrupted.
At first, the department told us that they had temporary technical glitches that would be resolved soon. But we are talking about months now and the narrative has been turning and twisting.
The latest that we have is that the immigration system was hacked and also that passport data may have been lost. This is a serious problem, if at all we really regard ourselves as a republic.
The fact that the issue of hackers taking over the immigration system came from the mouth of the State President should even worry us more.
Knowing how serious matters of immigration and citizenship are, it is absurd that the President declared that our security system was compromised and yet we still have those people who were reckless enough to let that happen in positions of power.
And the President expects those who failed to protect such delicate information to now do things right and get everything in order.
The only thing he did was to threaten them with dismissals, which we all know very well will not happen.
We live in this country and we have heard these things before. This is not the first time that the Tonse Alliance Administration will let mediocrity reign. It is just how we do things in Malawi.
As a country, we needed to be more serious with our affairs. We waste time on very useless things like political bickering and backbiting when the most important things remain neglected.
How are we even living with a compromised immigration system when we have the whole government intact? We are not at war or anything; we are just being Malawians – negligent.
And it is not like problems with the passport system started yesterday – we are by now used to not having passports issued or only issued dubiously to foreigners.
We are where we are today because we just love being here. We are too comfortable in our incompetence such that we have normalised inanity.
