By now, it is safe to conclude that our suffering is mostly masterminded by those we entrust with the responsibility of leading us. We are talking about political leaders who always put their personal interests above those of the nation.
By some act of evil, Malawi seems to have been cursed by such leaders, and there is literally no way out at the moment. This is a curse that has haunted us for generations and recent events indicate that we will pass it on to the next three generations.
As we speak, this country is going through one of the harshest economic lows in its history. We are at that moment where the government cannot guarantee us the next meal since it is failing to even generate enough forex. We do not have money to sustain us and we cannot even afford to import fuel for our cars.
A recent report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) indicates that our public debt is way above K7.3 trillion – figures that are just unsustainable and beyond our capacity to pay back. We are a country in debt and the consequences of such reckless borrowing haunt even children that are yet to be born.
And in all this mess, our political leaders seem the least concerned.
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While Malawians cannot afford to buy maize, whose prices have rocketed, members of Parliament are thinking of ways to make their lives even more comfortable. MP for Chitipa South, Werani Chilenga, shocked the nation when it was revealed that he intends to move a motion in Parliament that should force us to pay MPs who have been voted out of office for the rest of their lives.
Such ridiculous reasoning, coming from somebody who is supposed to be a leader, should shake us out of our sleep. Malawians must open their eyes to see the people we put in positions of power for who they really are. The most painful thing is that, if this bill goes to Parliament, it will surely pass. It is what it is – these people do not care about us.
It is not only this man whose thinking is faulty. The fact that the government has been signing strange deals with companies that always have something to do with bridges tells us that the rot has gone to the roof and the house will crumble.
Our government usually loses our taxes to bad deals and they seem not to learn anything from history. We are a people who easily get duped – or do we? Sometimes one may be tempted to believe that political leaders deliberately enter into bad deals to benefit in one way or another.
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There is no way a whole system of government can make similar mistakes time and again and not learn from them. There must be something fishy going on – something to keep Malawi poor.
When the Ministry of Agriculture announced that it was entering a commodity exchange deal with a company called East Bridge Estates, alarms were raised by well-meaning Malawians, but they were never heeded. This deal came soon after the same bigwigs tried to procure fertiliser from a butchery in the United Kingdom. Months later, we hear that the government has withdrawn from the deal, but now at a cost.
The owners of the bridge in the East are demanding more than K250 billion in the event that the deal is thwarted. And it is us, the poor, who are supposed to pay these people.
We will not even mention that there are several questions regarding the ownership of this company.
In the end, one realises that Malawians are on their own and that politicians have never loved us.
For a long time, politicians have taken Malawian for fools and there has been no agency from the citizenry to retaliate. We are too docile and this state of being has given crooks a competitive advantage over us.
Unless the ordinary citizen stands up to fight against those who abuse us – those up there – there will be no future for our country. The poverty that afflicts us today is something that is deliberately planned by those who are in power.
They want us to be poor. They want us to be dependent on them and their colonial masters. It is a scheme we must counter.
