Living consciously in a country like ours is not for the faint-hearted. It is not easy to live in a place where you have to endure the same familiar pangs while well aware that things could be better if only somebody did their job with due diligence.
We keep talking about the same things and singing the same old-age dirges without taking the necessary action to change our situation.
Politicians come and go – taking with them whatever loot they may salvage – but Malawi remains where she was 100 years ago, if not worse. This is what makes life here unbearable.
Just last week, President Lazarus Chakwera was at some event in the capital city, and among other things, he spoke against people who only love to speak. He said one of our problems is that we have a lot of people who talk about things but engage in very little practical action.
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The President’s statement couldn’t be any truer, and those who sat on the other side of the podium wondered if the big man was looking in the mirror.
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All talk and no action is what we have gotten from politicians since the second coming of multiparty democracy in 1994 and President Chakwera is as guilty of this charge as those who came before him. The problem is that we fail to see how our lack of practicality has kept us down over the years.
One of the things that the Tonse Alliance preached in their bid for power in 2020 was mindset change. They said Malawians needed to change the way they view the world around them if this country is to make any meaningful strides.
In the four years that they have been in power, ‘mindset change’ has become the buzz phrase that the administration rides on to make us believe that they are doing something about our situation.
But if you divorce yourself from the noise around this buzz, stand at a distance and observe, you will realize that we are where we have always been-in the middle of nowhere. Mindset change is just something that these politicians talk about, but nothing is being done to achieve the same.
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Transforming somebody’s mind demands more than just making speeches on podiums. It demands practical action and deliberate efforts.
In a country like ours, for example, higher education can be one of the avenues through which we can modify the consciousness of people to see things differently.
But if you look at the state of our institutions of higher learning, you will be disappointed because whatever is happening beyond the classroom cannot transform somebody’s mind.
To give a practical example, when Dr Kamuzu Banda established the University of Malawi back then, he set the standards so high that those who went to university came back different. Their worldviews changed and they were no longer the same people. These were Malawians who came from very remote places without electricity, running water, telephones and other modern amenities.
When they went to college, they were introduced to a different lifestyle – mail by the door, English breakfast, electricity, order and decorum.
The kind of education they were offered went beyond mere classroom lessons and aimed at transforming the whole person. This was a government advancing mindset change and not merely talking about it.
Today, students go to the university and come back the same because the situation is no longer what it was. They may even come back worse than before. There are students who come from homes with no basic facilities, and when they go to public universities, they are forced to seek accommodation in impoverished locations of our cities, not very different from their homes.
Today, most of our university students live like beggars on the street because the government has failed to provide them with basic necessities for survival. It is even worse for female students, some of whom have to survive on their bodies just to get by. And these are the people we are expecting to transform this country.
There are so many things that we do wrong and one of them is the failure to realise that we can do better with action than with words.
