Poverty is one of the things that benefit politicians in Malawi. Our leaders cannot even imagine how they would survive if all of us were to stop suffering today. What campaign promises would they make to convince us to vote for them?
If you consider carefully, you will realise that the entire political industry in Malawi survives on the language of poverty and that is why politicians will try as much as possible to keep us poor.
Knowing this, we should not be surprised when we see the government doing things that sustain the vicious circle of poverty.
Recently, it has been revealed that the government has written off billions of Kwacha in loans that people borrowed from the National Economic Empowerment Fund (Neef).
This is not the first time that the State has lost taxpayers’ money to bad debt. The Malawi Enterprise Development Fund, which was there before Neef, also wrote off about K9 billion of our money, which was given to some people.
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It is absurd that as poor as we are, we choose to be reckless with the meagre resources we have for political expediency.
Any Malawian who has lived here long enough can swear that the loans were probably given
to people who the government knew would not be able to repay.
One cannot even stand up to point at the investments that were made from this money. And as is always the case, no one in government will be held accountable for this negligence because if was expected in the first place.
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As such, we should not be surprised that we are poor because we deliberately choose poverty over everything else.
Had we been serious, Neef would have been a game-changer and a lifeline for the millions of youth who are barely surviving in our villages.
One wonders why we are sweating – exporting cheap labour to Israel – when we can afford to throw away billions at will. A lot of money is also wasted every year through the Affordable Inputs Programme, which has been poorly run for years without solving the problems it was supposed to address.
It is as if the government budgets for money to throw away every year, just to get some votes at the end of the day. The same people will get such subsidies every year and waste them without any repercussions. That is just how we do things here.
As already stated above, our biggest problem is politics. Politicians put their personal needs above the aspirations of the nation and they make sure that they win before anything else.
Those who have failed to repay their debts to Neef are now feeling relieved that they have gotten away with it.
These people are very grateful to the government of the day for it has given them free money to eat. The defaulters will most likely vote this government into power once they have been given the chance to cast their ballots.
It is a win-win situation – the politician gets the vote and you get the money. Both parties in the business forget about the thin cow that is been milked – Malawi. It is such practices that keep us poor and it is enraging that this is done deliberately and without remorse.
As a God-fearing nation, we should be praying that one day a leader should come who would have a broader perspective on our state of affairs.
Our country needs leaders who are willing to sacrifice themselves and all their ambitions in service to the country.
We need selfless leaders who understand that we cannot be poor forever. The countries we admire so much out there are where they are because some people made sacrifices.
As citizens, we also cannot just sit back and watch as politicians make poor decisions that negatively affect us. We need to stand up and demand answers and explanations when some of these things happen.
It is not enough for us to know that billions of Kwacha have been lost and then just to curse and move on.
Can they tell us who exactly has failed to repay their loans and why? Who will be held accountable for this mess? Or maybe we just have to understand that poverty is good business for politicians.
