Until recently, the excitement has been that Malawian youths are boarding planes to Isarael in large numbers. They are not going there to fight, as many would assume, since that country is at war. They are rather going there to work as laborers in mega farms. The Malawi government signed a strange pact with its ally that was to see 100,000 young Malawians exported to work in Israel for at least five years. But all of a sudden, the benefactor has had a change of heart and they say they can only take 2500 of us. The workers will also only be able to work for a maximum of 2 years.
This news has sent a wave of disappointment, especially in the authorities who were counting on the arrangement to score some points on their campaign promises of creating a million jobs. Reading through comments on social media pages, most young men and women also seem to be disappointed as they had already made plans of leaving this country for as long as five years. These young people do not care about the working conditions or living arrangements in Israel. They just want to leave this place where hope dies in infancy. They have great expectations of a better life elsewhere.
Strangely, through this program, our government also had great expectations in the sense that they felt they would get rid of a huge chunk of otherwise productive young men and women who are just loitering in the streets, drinking and doing whatever else keeps them busy. Unemployment has always been a big problem in this country and no regime has proven to provide any meaningful and lasting solution to this. This is why most jumped on the Tonse Alliance train when it went about promising job creation. Not many of us imagined that the jobs would not be created here but in Israel.
One wonders why the Tonse administration thinks that exporting labour is the solution to some of the country’s problems. There is no basis for arguing that this arrangement could improve our economy or, let alone, the lives of those who are sold to work out there. History tells us otherwise. This is not the first time Malawi is exporting cheap labour to other countries, and when this happened before, we did not gain anything as a country. During the colonial days, the role of Malawi in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was to supply cheap labor that developed the other federal states while we remained behind. The practice went on beyond the federation and we exported our brothers and sisters to South Africa and other countries through Wenela and Theba. These people came back with nothing but stories of gold mines, cheap whiskeys, and some blankets. Years of labour exportations never benefitted Malawi as its productive citizens wasted their energy on developing other economies. Why then would we think that the Israel deal is a gold mine?
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What is also morbidly absurd is the fact that we are sending people to contribute to the agricultural sector of a relatively developed country while our own agriculture suffers from lack of investment both in human and material resources. We are a country that claims to build our economy around agriculture and yet we have not managed to fully mechanize and commercialize the industry. One then wonders why we would send some qualified youths to work for Isarael when serious investment in our own agricultural industry would see these young people’s efforts develop our own country. Some light switch is off somewhere.
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As a country, we should not be banking our hopes for better lives on a foreign country when we have the potential to improve ourselves from within. The major farms we have been singing about have the potential to absorb and put to good use these young people we are wasting to Israel. The massive industrialisation that Chakwera and Chilima talked about in their campaign can revolutionize our economy and see our relatives trekking back from South Africa to work for their country. But as the Somali poet, Warsan Shire, rightly puts it, “nobody leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark… No one leaves home unless home chases you, fire under feet.
