Ask China for agricultural inputs

Dear Government,

We are small people. We are little voters. We elect you, our leaders to serve us. Your chances of re-election depend on us, the small but powerful deciders.  If the majority of us, anonymous electors, are not satisfied with your performance, we will not vote for you. Ipso facto, if we are satisfied, we will massively vote for you. Examples abound.

To make the democratic process of selecting leaders very clear to the people, the French, les francais, treat the word vote as going beyond casting ballots. When counting the ballots, the cards, forms, pieces of paper on which we tick whom we want to govern us, the French say election officials counting les voix, voices for candidates.

In between elections, French pollsters, conduct les sondages, opinion polls and publish the opinions, les voix, to inform the elected leaders about the what les voix du peuple, the voices of the people are, how the people  judge their lived situation hic et nunc (there and then; nthawi imeneyo).

The opinion polls also assess les voix du people vis-à-vis the official opposition, the minority as the Americans would say. They ask the people if they feel the opposition is doing its right role as a government-in-waiting.

In Malawi, specially, opinion polls are rare.  Externally funded ones, such as the Afrobarometer surveys, are conducted subject to availability of donor funds, and often accepted with a pinch of salt. Locally-funded ones are usually frowned upon. The media don’t conduct and publish any opinion polls.

As a result, people take to social media and call-ins on radio stations to express their voices, and assessment of government performance.

Now, in the absence of genuine, professionally-generated opinion polls, social media posts and radio call-ins are the only resource on which to base our conclusion.  And the conclusion is that the people are unhappy about the performance of government and they feel ignored when they offer suggestions for improvement.

The people are unhappy for a whole country to engage a small nondescript briefcase, website-based European company to obtain fertilisers for the country’s all-important agricultural production. Last time, the owner of a London butchery was paid a relatively large sum of money (by Malawian poverty standards) to secure inputs for the Agriculture Inputs Programme (AIP). Before we forget about that scandal, this year we heard the Malawi government had entered into an arrangement with a European pharmaceutical distribution company to provide fertiliser on a barter arrangement.

These dubious arrangements were revealed by the media and made public by social media. Then the so-called opposition jumped up and down blaming this and that one except its own incompetence.  The opposition naps and even when revelations of dubious deals surface it suggests nothing because it has nothing to suggest except demanding increases in CDF, parliamentary sitting allowances, and other MP freebies.

We, the real, original, unbiased, and unimpeachable opposition do hereby suggest to you, Mr and Mrs Government, to remember that Malawi is a State. As such, the State must stop henceforth negotiating silly deals with silly small companies that only children and cowboys of Mr and Mrs Government have heard about and known.  By engaging with almost nonexistent entities, we are demonstrating to the world our level of thinking and self-ranking.   We are telling the world we exist at the level of a website-only company. Existence is not enough. Malawi must live. 

Mr and Mrs Government must stop treating the internet as a human being they, Mr and Mrs Government, can deal with seriously and without expecting a scandal. Stop now and save us from further international shame.  Your intentions to quickly source supplies of agricultural inputs is genuine and commendable but learn to follow the stately way of doing government business.

Mr and Mrs Government should, henceforth, deal only with State parties and bilateral and multilateral institutions.  If the West and North are unwilling to provide us with agricultural inputs that we so dearly need, let us go East and South. If, today, we ask Iran, yes Iran, Russia, of course Russia, Brazil and Argentina, yes the agricultural giants of Latin America, India, yes India which provided the farm tractors that were pocketed, and China, especially China, we can get all the agricultural inputs next month.

We like the barter arrangement, to be honest.