Stuck in yoke of mediocrity
Mdzukulu, E.W. Wilcox said: “To sin in silence when we should be protesting is to make cowards out of men”.
The yoke of mediocrity hangs heavy over our nation, sinking it and suffocating it, with each passing day because the leadership is full of it.
A twenty-five-year courtship with mediocrity has brought us to the edge of the abyss of cluelessness and an embrace of multiparty presidents and their sycophants has been no doubt an until-death marriage with the conjugal rewards of the extremes of hopeless economic stagnation, abject poverty and a dearth of a reasoned existence for the country.
Mdzukulu, that some of the country’s post-1994 leaders have elected to shamelessly wear on their foreheads kaunjika doctorate degrees when they should have hang those in their offices and paid them no further attention is a tacit admission by these leaders that they fall far short of meeting the requirements for ascendancy to this high office.
Mdzukulu, findings from a review exercise of the ambitious plan validated Tuesday in Lilongwe by the National Planning Commission show that despite Malawi making progress in some indicators during the implementation period, the country has failed to meet most of the targets with the performance rated under par and below the world’s average in some instances.
Taking stakeholders through major failures of Vision 2020, Oilve Saasa, proprietor and lead consultant of Premier Consult Limited, a firm the commission engaged to review and analyse the blueprint, said: “The country was doing efficiently in wrong things.”
The country has had two decades to crystallise visionary and servant leadership and a serious long-term national development blueprint that can bring some semblance of order and continuity in the country’s state of affairs and a springboard for attaining the much talked about middle-income economy but nothing noteworthy thus far.
However, mdzukulu, how Malawians perceive elective office and public service has everything to do with this sorry state of affairs.
Malawians are fast and irreversibly becoming a society believing anything is acceptable as long as there is no explicit law against it or they are not caught in the act of commission.
Mdzukulu, isn’t living recklessly or visionless as Vision 2020’s review has revealed – like there is no tomorrow or there are no generations coming after this generation – the same as eating own offspring?
Surely, a move to permanently consign to the graveyard mediocrity – with all the national evils associated with it – that has served only to thwart the country’s reasoned existence cannot come quickly enough.
Mdzukulu, the country needs some serious transformative or restorative rebirth in how the citizenry perceive elective office, public service and the public good.
To be clear mdzukulu, the many problems the country is grappling with arise from the shameless greed – dearth of the twin senses of shame and pride – and the lack of love-of-country by people charged with the responsibility of running the affairs of the country that makes it ‘acceptable’ to seek elective office and hold public office to serve and further one’s personal interests at the expense of serving and furthering the interests of the office and the people who put one in office.
So no amount of blueprints Malawi will produce will cure the country’s ills because it cannot cure shameless greed and the lack of love-of-country stemming from mediocrity.
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