Business Unpacked

5 years later, ‘Canaan’ remains far-fetched dream

Five years ago, the Tonse Alliance team with Malawi Congress Party president Lazarus Chakwera and his UTM Party counterpart Saulos Chilima as ‘poster boys’ crisscrossed the country and won the hearts of many Malawians with a list of promises meant to take them from poverty to prosperity.

The Biblical Promised Land of Canaan was the standard and Malawians envisioned a better world in the land flowing with milk and honey. It was little wonder that 2.6 million voters, representing 59.34 percent trusted the pair with the mandate to govern.

In their minds, they saw President Chakwera as the latter day Moses, who, in Exodus 14:13 gave hope to the Israelites when he stated: “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again…”

Calm is what Moses demanded from the Israelites.

Five years later, President Chakwera is pleading with Malawians to appreciate that his first-term largely focused on fixing broken systems and that they should look forward to enjoying the fruits if they give him a fresh mandate in the September 16 General Election. For the record, he had already cautioned the nation in 2020 that they would face hardships in the first five years as systems will be fixed.

Hard choices and trade-offs coupled with credible revenue projections alongside sustainable expenditure are critical to healing an economy on life-support machine. However, the painful experience of enduring swallowing bitter pills only becomes satisfying where one sees that they are positively responding to the prescription. In the case of the Malawi economy, the response has rather been slow.

In January 2021, the Malawi Government launched the Malawi 2063 (MW2063) as a successor long-term development strategy to Vision 2020 that had expired after achieving minimal targets, largely due to lack of focus. Through the new strategy, Malawi aspires to be “an inclusively wealthy and self-reliant nation” by 2063.

To many a Malawian, the strategy was or is seen as the gateway out of poverty to the imaginary Promised Land of Canaan where milk and honey will flow.

The National Planning Commission (NPC) was formed, as a coordinating agency, to ensure the attainment of the objectives having drawn lessons from Vision 2020. MW2063 has 10-Year Implementation Plans (MIP) complete with 10-year targets. It is premised on three interrelated and inter-dependent pillars of agricultural productivity and commercialisation, resource-based industrialisation and urbanisation.

In a nutshell, Malawi seeks to be an upper middle-income country by 2063 with the ability to fund its own development needs unlike now when it depends on development partners. MIP-1 targets to make Malawi a lower middle-income economy by 2030, all things being equal.

But things do not seem to be going according to plan as the reality is that Malawi may not become a lower middle-income country by 2030 given the prevailing growth rates and circumstances. NPC is on record as having said that it would take 15 years to get there unless the economy consistently grows by 10 percent between now and 2030, a tall order given the paltry average two percent annual growth.

External crises that have spilled over to Malawi as well as internal weather-induced catastrophes have been cited as factors that have derailed the Malawi economy from growing at the desired minimum of six percent per annum to consistently achieve the targets.

It is 38 years to MW2063 and the ball is in the court of our generation to decide what country we want future generations to find in 2063 and beyond. To achieve the aspirations, there will be need to set the right priorities and include manufacturing for export in the key priorities.

Post Covid-19, life has not been the same. The situation has been worse for vulnerable economies such as Malawi’s which has registered paltry growth rates averaging two percent.

In the circumstances, resilience is what is making the difference among the economies in terms of recovery. What is reliance? American attorney Elizabeth Edwards said: “Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it is less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.”

This week, the World Bank said the recent trend of weak growth has dampened prospects of low income countries (LICs) such as Malawi from graduating to middle-income status. According to the bank, in Africa only Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda are expected to graduate by 2035 while by 2050 it will also be only another three making the transition.

In an analysis titled ‘Falling graduation prospects: Low-income countries in the 21st Century’ the World Bank said the economic challenges confronting LICs, including Malawi, have intensified in the last 15 years amid deadlier conflict and violence, climate shocks, debt crises and anaemic growth.

While external and internal shocks are a factor, Malawi also needs to ensure policy consistency if recovery is to bear fruits. It does not help to have a tight monetary policy on the one hand when on the fiscal side there is high spending that creates deficits financed by domestic borrowing. Fiscal discipline should not be just podium rhetoric, it must be seen and felt to be done.

I will quote Edwards’ last part “you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good”. Malawi has done the acceptance, it is now time to put together something good and that something good, in my view, is consistency! Policies should be reading and responding to each other.

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Back to top button