Let’s admit: Malawi is failed state

Those who have followed us since time immemorial know us as a buoyant expedition full of positive energy and an appreciative mindset. Those have cared so far must have seen our ability to see good and greatness where others only see bad and weakness.  We inject happiness into situations to lighten the mood of the sick and downcast. We don’t want to be associated with sadness.

However, today, this year and in this century, we, too, have concluded that Malawi is indeed a totally failed state. Even if God, Allah, Jah Rastatafari, Mbona, Chisumphi, Chata and Chiuta decided to come in person and directly help Malawi from its self-inflicted failure, they would not succeed.

It is only a failed state and its citizens that think it is normal for a city to have no piped water for days and sometimes even weeks.  If you disagree with us go to Blantyre City.

There, people, citizens have stopped reporting and complaining about failure of the Blantyre Water Board (BWB) to provide water every minute of every day and every night. Instead, the citizens of our failed state just smile at billboards advertising the successes of the President in providing water.

The water providers of a failed state don’t even bother to apologise or provide alternative means of supplying water when, admittedly, the system needs repairing.  The water providers of the failed state have no shame in issuing bills for water that was never supplied and the citizens of the failed state don’t complain even when they are being charged for non-existent services. Ours is a failed state.

Malawi is a failed state, we repeat; for only in a failed state are people threatened with closure of properties if they fail to pay land rates when the city authorities have never even bothered to gravel access roads and collect rubbish for 25 years. 

Twenty-five years ago, the MCP government went round Ndirande, Chilomoni, Chilobwe, Bangwe, Che Musa and other locations, sorry, townships, to regularly collect rubbish, but in today’s failed Malawi, the only people who matter are those in Nyambadwe and BCA, from where rubbish is collected only to be dumped near Kachere, a location from where rubbish heaps are competing with the nearby Mpingwe hill.  Even street lights in a failed state are distributed following an elitist strategy.

If you don’t believe us, check when the garbage was last collected from Area 25, Area 36, and Kawale in Lilongwe and Zolozolo, Lubinga, and Masasa (Geisha) in Mzuzu. By the way, has the garbage container at Kamuzu Road in Salima been emptied? And in Karonga?  Failed nation, failed state, failed Malawi.

In a failed state, provision of electricity is a luxury. 55 years after our ancestors wasted their blood to gain independence from Britain, mains electricity still can’t reach 90 percent of our very narrow and short country. Even if an area is connected to the grid, nearly half of the time there is no power. And no apology. And no complaint.  As expected of the failed state.

Monkeys, hippos, lions, dry spells, floods, lack of sunshine, sand, weeds, clouds, mwera and vuma winds and witchcraft have all been blamed for Egenco and Escom’s failure to provide power. A failed state blames external forces; not its own mediocrity.

While some states feel the pressure to provide electricity as a human right, a failed state doesn’t care to learn even from Rwanda, which is planning to have its own nuclear station to provide electricity to its population. Instead, failed states busy themselves with buying and stealing the same tractors, introducing ghosts into Ifmis and election servers to empty the national treasury and presidential votes, and statutory energy companies and closing them after stealing investment money. 

Failed states and their failed citizens steal from themselves. After stealing from themselves failed citizens boast that they are clever. That’s what state failure does to citizens.

Nonetheless, we acknowledge that failure is not death. And death is not burial. We are not buried and one day this same state, shall rise from its deep slumber, mediocrity, thieving to be a strong nation accountable to its citizens. One day.