Riding a dead horse since 1964
It remains unclear whether there is a grain of truth to the famous tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians which says that, “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount and get a fresh horse.”
But in Malawi, everyone refuses to get off the dead horse that is deteriorating social services and a tanking economy and provide solutions, among them getting a fresh horse.
The country is experiencing the worst electricity shortages in years with blackouts ranging from eight to 12 hours. Blackouts are crippling industries which should be spurring economic growth and giving jobs to the millions of Malawian youths walking the streets with academic qualifications in their pockets.
Decades after water intakes for our water boards were constructed, only now are we thinking about building dams: riding a dead horse.
We have become a thieving nation with incidences of fraud and corruption so rampant that you wonder if it is the system which is faulty or the people themselves are simply evil.
The health system is bleeding, nurses are not providing the necessary care to patients and instead we have the audacity to stop hiring medical personnel because we don’t have money. There is no money to hire medical assistants but there is more than enough to visit New York for weeks for a bit of sight-seeing and maybe a few speeches and photo opportunities with the who is who at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).
There has been one solution to our problems as a nation but we have opted to beat the dead horse to life, by changing policies but not personnel, reviewing laws but not enforcing them and writing beautiful policy documents with little evaluation of their effectiveness.
As the dead horse theory indicates, we have done all 13 stages to no avail. When it became clear that the electricity generation capacity against demand would not be met, our government simply bought a stronger whip, donors, with the hope that it would resuscitate the dead horse.
Lilongwe has been growing at an alarming pace since 1998 but plans for a new intake dam have not materialised even after appointment of a committee to study the dead horse and arranging visits to other countries to see how cultures ride dead horses.
Rationing water, loadshedding and reducing the number of beneficiaries of input subsidies, the equivalent of lowering the standards so that dead horses can be more productive, has not produced results. The horse remains dead: no water, no electricity, hunger still bites and certainly drug shortages remain.
Outside contractors have been hired to urge the dead horse into motion and several dead horses have been harnessed to try to increase its speed; providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance but the horse remains dead.
The analogy of the dead horse simply says that Malawi needs to stop doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. That is madness and we are at risk of being declared mentally ill at the rate we are going as a nation. It is time to get off the dead horse and get a fresh one. n
