By Wesley Macheso
Someone somewhere said it is hard not to live in sin when you are living in a country like Malawi. This is a place where systems don’t work and even our economy is controlled by black market forces.
This makes it very difficult for things to work properly and people often resort to shortcuts when they want to get things done; something that has aided corruption.
Imagine living in a country where access to basic commodities like petrol and diesel is a luxury, and in all this, the government pretends as if everything is in order.
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It is depressing—for lack of a better word—to be living a lie and to have leaders who pretend that they have everything under control.
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As we speak, the country is experiencing a massive shortage of foreign currency for daily operations, which has also resulted in the scarcity of fuel, among other commodities.
Every a toddler on the streets knows that one of our problems is that what our central bank wants us to believe is the value of the United States dollar is a lie. The authorities are living in illusions where the dollar is less than K2,000.
In those dreams, the dollar is not available and Malawians cannot access it. Those who have the dollar on the black market are telling us that its value is about K3,000, and they have it.
The disease of keeping up appearances is a big problem with the Tonse Alliance. Ever since they came to power, they have tried to appear above their weight and that has negatively affected the average Malawian.
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Presently, they are clinging to the lie that the Kwacha has not lost value just so they seem to be in control of the economy.
The disturbing thing with them is that they don’t think about Malawians. They only think about votes and securing their eating habits. But the wound they have been trying to hide is now too big for all of us to see.
It was interesting to see the State President, Lazarus Chakwera, coming out to speak to us after months in the closet.
The big man was not available when Malawians needed him most. While we spent sleepless nights on fuel queues, the President was busy touring the country, unbothered.
Perhaps he wanted to paint a picture that life was going on when the country was literally at a standstill.
His coming out to tell us that he is working on a deal with the oil-rich United Arab Emirates was not impressive because we have heard of so many deals that his government was working on that did not yield anything. Wasn’t it just last week that we heard that the government was going into another deal with the Republic of Kenya?
One of the biggest problems with the Malawi Congress Party administration is that they do not want to take blame and accept responsibility for their actions.
When our economy started sinking four years ago, they lied to us that it was because the previous regime had cooked figures and misrepresented us to some Western masters. When that lie had run its course, they told us to blame our fate on the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
They wanted to make us believe that the problems were universal when it was them failing. Eventually, they shifted blame to the debt that their predecessors apparently accrued, only for us to realise that this government has borrowed more than three times what their friends before them accumulated.
In essence, they are the ones to blame for this sinking ship.
If Malawi is to make any meaningful progress, those in power must stop living in illusions and face their reality. That reality is the factuality of their failure.
They must accept that they have failed to do even half the things that they promised they would do when they demonized their predecessors in 2019.
Tonse alliance has failed to strategically steer this nation towards the right direction, or in any direction at all. They keep making the same pedestrian mistakes expecting that they will yield different results.
As citizens, we must take our right to vote very seriously and carefully decide our destiny come next year. We can’t continue to live in this deplorable destitution.
