Governments are lousy economic players

 Last week, a report was presented in Parliament, to the effect that Malawi had lost out on the possibility of exporting produce to South Sudan and earning forex in the process. Government had championed and concluded the deal for Malawi to export agreed quantities of several agricultural items.

As expected, local media houses picked the issue up and reported it on social media. The report that I read stated that government had failed to export the agreed quantities. And many people believe this was government’s failure as they should have risen to the occasion on our behalf.

But wait a minute! This was our failure a s Mal awi ans . Yes , gov ernment should have spearheaded the negotiations and should have sealed the deal, both of which were done. But that is where they should have stopped. The rest was for the private citizens, you and me, to do. Commercial transactions are best undertaken by the private sector rather than by governments.

Throughout the world, governments make very poor commercial actors because idea ls like efficiency or prudence are usually alien to them. I have worked in both the private and public sectors and I know, through experience, that the two worlds are poles apart. The report I referred to above mentioned, among other things, that some flour that had been dispatched to South Sudan got rotten in transit. The exporter was not mentioned but I would not be surprised if turned out to be government. A private entity would have bent over backwards to make sure that the best procedure was used to export the commodity. Best in terms of appropriate storage conditions in transit, and routes that would not take forever for the commodity to get to its destination.

Where government can be faulted is that they probably did not sensitise t h e p u b l i c enough about the opportunity. In its casual approach to things, it did not reach out to capable private citizens with adequate communication to inform them of what needed to be done and how it had to be done. This is precisely where the media failed us. They should have run countless articles/ programmes to inform the public about this window of an opportunity to send commodities to South Sudan. For several years, Malawians have been reeling under a severe lack of market opportunities for their produce. Some would surely have jumped on this opening and would have done what needed to be done in order not to disappoint.

No, government would not be the best entity to export produce to South Sudan. Neither would it be to run mega farms or engage in any other commercial activity. Yet we somehow expect it to do all this, and more. There have been reports indicating that another window has opened for Malawi, not the government of Malawi, to export up to 100 000 metric tonnes of soya to Tanzania. Rather than waiting for the sluggish government machinery to take advantage of this opportunity, we, private citizens, should put our act together and go for it. One door may have closed but another has opened. We need to focus on the open one, and not the other way round.

We all need to roll up our sleeves and get to work. This country is insolvent. The other day I saw a chart showing how our exports have been shrinking over the last 10 years or so. It was very bad reading. In 2022, our total exports were below K1 trillion. This is very scary when you consider that our annual budget for fuel alone hovers around K700 billion. Fuel alone will consume nearly all our 2022 export earnings. A corollary to this is that if we import other items like fertiliser or motor vehicles, which we obviously do, we will not have an uninterrupted supply of fuel. The ugly scene of long queues at filling stations will be a more permanent feature of our society than we would want it to be.

Grants and remittances from abroad will go some way towards filling the yawning gap between imports and exports but these are severely limited as we have little control over them. The only viable alternative is a tough one: increase the value of our exports. It has already been established that governments, including the Malawi Government, are louse economic players. You and I should rise to the occasion and utililise any windows of opportunity that arise in terms of exports of whatever items. The Tanzanian window is still open and we should jump on it.

We need to search within our communities to find out what we can do to collectively to amass the financial resources needed for exports