This and That

Long wait for Culture Policy

Good people, the writing is on the wall: Malawi is the poorest country on earth.

This is not surprising. For years, symptoms of a failed State have been all over the place, being sanitised into officially understated statistics that once deluded us to think we were the world’s fastest-growing economy second to the oil-rich Qatar.

However, the greatest diagnosis of our pitiful decline in a fast-changing world came this week when the World Bank named Malawi the least developed nation on Earth.

What a disgrace!

Once upon a time, the world and Britton Woods experts knew our nation, which ranked 153 out of 169 countries on the UN Human Development Index, as a hard working people eager to uplift themselves the honest way.

It seems that virtue is up in smoke and the world knows us as a nation of lazy crooks where the only fastest-rising industry is corruption.

The main tragedy is that we are busy stealing the future of our country and children while one-time conflict-torn cousins—the likes of Mozambique, Angola and Rwanda—are not rising again. They are rising sharply.

But this is the penalty you pay for doing business as usual; using old means to achieve extraordinary results. In the 21st Century, an agricultural economy will not blame anybody for becoming a specimen of poverty if it chains its people to hoes.

The ricocheting effect of this politics of poverty mars a week we were supposed to be saluting Cabinet for passing the good ole national cultural policy which has been gathering dust at Capital Hill for decades.

If you were expecting confirmation of what a pitiful lot (the pun is intended) we have been for 51 years of our nationhood, this is it.

The need for the cultural policy was realised as early as 1981 when the United Nations Educational Scientific Organisation (Unesco) commissioned a study on how the country can safeguard, promote and profit from its immerse cultural heritage.

Ever since, government officials have been only happy to pocket UN-certified allowances in the name of wider consultation with stakeholders, including the creative sector which needs the guidebook most.

While the wait was continuing, our failed State in 2012 bagged millions of dollars from the “Expert Facility to Strengthen the System of Governance for Culture in Developing Countries” jointly financed by the European Union and Unesco to offer technical assistance on developing a National Cultural Policy.

It is amazing how the ministers of this Cashgate Republic came and left without passing the cultural policy as if they did not know how much entertainment, arts and culture nourishes our ailing economy. Needless to say, the industry at the heart of the policy ministers have long neglected comprises numerous Malawians earning a living the honest way and paying hefty taxes authorized by the same officials that abandoned the policy God knows where.

By nodding to the cultural policy, Cabinet will only end the long wait—a bitter gift which keeps gifting arts journalists and government critics tasty headlines that offer students of public administration good example of everything not to do when it comes to policy-making. But it is brings bad memories of wasted decades.

 

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