One question that every conscious Malawian asks themselves today is: Where did we lose it? History has it that we used to be a country with standards. There was a time the leadership of this country knew exactly what was good for us and we could tread the continent with no marks of shame on our faces. Now we have become the laughing stock of not only the rest of the world, but even our own Southern African Development Community region.
We are the least developed and least ambitious country around here–all thanks to these politicians in suits and borrowed English accents.
It is such a shame that we have degraded ourselves this low. It even becomes more depressing than ever to know that the people who have normalised this mediocrity have spent a good part of their lives outside this country. Those who have travelled would testify that life is not supposed to be lived the way we live it here.
There are a lot of things that we are doing wrong when we know very well that we can do things right. Maybe there is some dark cloud that only covers the eyes of politicians so that they suddenly become too blind to see and do things right when they are in power.
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President Lazarus Chakwera and the rest of his government need to be ashamed of what they are allowing to happen in this country. In fact, we can go back to two or more presidents before him, except for Bingu wa Mutharika.
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These are people who have low standards and they have imposed those [low standards] on our nation such that we have become a joke. As a Malawian, people from other countries will always look down on you because they know just how mediocre your country is.
All of us in this region of the world are emerging from similar oppressive colonial circumstances, but it is difficult to imagine why we are still the ones stuck in the mud.
The recent International Coach Terminal scandal in Lilongwe should tell you that we, as a country, are not serious. There is no way an entire city council in a functioning country can arrive at a decision that buses should now be ferrying people from that eyesore.
The fact that this happened means there is something wrong somewhere. Somebody is not doing his or her job. Imagine being a leader at Lilongwe City Council, probably being driven in a state-of-the-art Toyota Prado TX, and you think it wise to have that non-structure as an international bus terminal. It does not make sense at all that you could be thinking that way.
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This also goes to show that the Central Government system itself has a problem. Those who are in authority take Malawians for granted and they want to subject us to low standards at the expense of our dignity and our own lives. Had it been that we were serious about our affairs, even the accident that claimed the life of Vice President Saulos Chilima could not have happened. That accident occurred because the government is failing to construct a proper airport in Mzuzu.
This is despite the fact that some donors already made funds available for the project. As of October last year, our Minister of Finance was failing to provide a plausible explanation as to why a feasibility study for the project is not yet in motion.
And Mzuzu airport and the bus terminal are just the tip of the iceberg that is sinking this ship. These politicians who pretend to be leaders know that the Lilongwe international airport is not international and they are happy with that because, to them, Malawi does not have standards. It is obvious that one of the problems we have in this country is that we are taken for granted.
A Malawian is not supposed to complain or demand more from the powers-that-be because we have been deliberately conditioned to look down on ourselves.
To their advantage, politicians have normalised mediocrity such that it has become a part of who we are. Any Malawian who asks for high standards is seen as strange. It is no longer Malawian to demand quality. The government deems it right for us to board buses from maizefields with pit latrines because that is the Malawian way. How embarrassing!
