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Improvisation will get us nowhere

Malawians have a tendency to shun anything formal, preferring to proceed by improvisation instead. This is as true of music as it is of sports, medical treatment and other pursuits.

I have known people who, when feeling feverish, will simply buy painkillers and take them, or even take malaria drugs before tests are done to detect malaria parasites. To them, the malaria test is too procedural and the quick way around the problem is to take anything perceived to give them some relief.

I once travelled from Blantyre to Zomba in the company of a colleague, who was a journalist. He was going to Zomba to cover the graduation ceremony, but I was going there on a different errand.

Once we reached Zomba, my colleague met his friends from Chancellor College and they went out drinking. He did not attend the graduation ceremony. He came back in the late afternoon and started to ask for the printed speeches, from which he would create his story. Now, you do not need to be a journalist to regurgitate what is in other people’s speeches. Anybody with reasonable ability to write can do that. You do need to be one to describe the mood of a function or the extra-ordinary thing that happens as the function progresses. This you cannot do, unless you are present at the function.

Journalism is not so much about describing the expected things as about exposing the unexpected happenings. When war breaks out, everybody leaves the battle zone in an attempt to get to safety, and that is the time journalists arrive. To effectively capture and report news, the reporter needs to be present where the news is happening. My colleague thought it was rather too formal to be at the ceremony and opted instead to take a shortcut by using material which had been compiled by somebody else.

When the gulf war broke out in 1990, Saddam Hussein decided to take the opportunity to pound Israel with scud missiles. People living in Israel were greatly terrified. Foreigners began to leave. It was at that point that Katie Adie, a BBC reporter, arrived. The Israelites had a sophisticated mechanism for intercepting the scud missiles. When one approached, sirens were sounded to warn the people and eventually the missile would be disabled in mid air. The lady reporter witnessed all this and reported faithfully from the frontline.

“The loud sirens that you hear indicate that a scud is on its way,” she would report on BBC television. When a disabled missile landed, Kate would get close to it and say to the viewers, “This, behind me, is a scud missile, which has just landed.”

To me, that is authentic journalism. Katie created her own footage in the most difficult of circumstances. No improvisation can accomplish such a feat. One needs to be true to the rules of the game to be such an outstanding reporter. Rule number one: be present where the news is happening.

Malawian culture is steep in improvisations, I am afraid. Improvisation in music, improvisation in sports and, yes, improvisation in education, agriculture, and the list goes on. In music, for example, people shun use of sheet music and prefer to play music by the ear. When Michael Jackson composed We are the World, he distributed copies of the notated music to several artists so that they would practise on their own before finally getting together for a joint rehearsal. I doubt if a similar arrangement can be accomplished in Malawi among our secular musicians.

The word improvisation does not even begin to describe the state of our primary school sports. Sports disciplines have simply been abandoned in primary (and even in secondary) schools. Many primary school pupils today will have no idea what long jump or relay race is, not to mention shot-put, pole vault or the javelin. This, to me, is inexplicable because most of these disciplines do not require any financial resources to be implemented, just some discipline on the part of the teachers. Cross country race, for example, can be implemented with zero kwacha. All you need to do is define your route and place people on strategic positions along that route. The rest will be done by the athletes’ legs.

There has to be a solution to this mediocrity. The solution, I am convinced, lies within us. We just need to diligently search within ourselves and unearth the desire, the passion, indeed the discipline needed to wean ourselves from the culture of improvisation.

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