Logs from the graveyard
Honourable Folks, there’s something about decentralisation that needs urgent attention. Who conducts the environmental impact assessment of the developmental projects spearheaded by our newly-elected councillors at the grassroots?
Or you think it’s only when a project is of Kayelekera or Nsanje World Inland Port magnitude that such an assessment becomes an issue? Wait until you hear my story.
I was driving past a graveyard in Mulanje, last Saturday, when I saw about 10 men, some cutting down natural trees, some chopping them into logs and others loading their graveyard harvest into a small pick-up.
It turned out that all of them were volunteers whose only interest was to provide bricks, sand and stones for a junior school block some good Samaritan had reportedly offered to build in our neighbourhood. Chitukuko. Development!
An equally progressive chief gave them the permission to invade the home of the dead and get the trees from there. As I said last month when commenting on government’s decision to ban plastic carrier bags, in the western part of Mulanje where I call home, it’s only at graveyards where trees are found. There’s hardly a single natural tree even along Thuchila, a river which was graced by huge natural trees and other types of vegetation on its banks before the advent of the multiparty government in 1994.
Today, it’s bare-back through and through. I bet every primary school in the area has a 100 metre football ground but there’s hardly a school there with a woodlot. The founding father of the Malawi nation, His Excellency, Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda must be turning in his mausoleum!
Though the population was less than half of what it is today and though there were by far more trees—both natural and exotic—almost anywhere in the country then than is the case today, Kamuzu made it stick in our tiny heads that the rule is: “cut a tree, plant three”.
He introduced National Tree Planting Day and ensured that on that day it wasn’t life as usual. He personally took the lead in planting a tree. He would then hold a rally where he would stress the importance of tree planting.
He may not have bragged about PPP (public private partnership), but Kamuzu’s administration found an ally in Carlsberg Malawi Breweries who mounted a formidable make-Malawi-green campaign. Even inebriated imbibers could not easily forget the campaign. It was closely tied to the catchy advert “Give a guy a green.”
All that did not exactly stop the wanton cutting of trees. What it did was to teach Malawians that it’s their duty to replace the trees they cut. It also made us, the pupils of the ‘70s, value the importance of having a woodlot.
Not so with the folks I found cutting down trees from the graveyard. To them, the chief who gave them permission and the organisation which has offered to build a school block for the toddlers, what matters is the end. The means is of no consequence.
Probably a politician will be the guest of honour when the school is finally built and our children stop travelling a long distance in search of education. More promises are likely to be made at that function.
But nobody will touch on the fact that when finally all the trees are harvested from our graveyards, there won’t be any trees left for future development projects. They will only be a desert, bare land to pass on to our children.
As for the soil, it gave up its fertility a long time ago and nothing is being done to replenish it. Year after year, people at home grow maize on the same piece of land and look to government for subsidised fertiliser which, I’m told feeds the plant but does nothing to improve soil fertility.
Our parents passed on to us a Malawi of milk and honey. Must we, in turn, make our children inherit a desert? Or is the desertification story above very different from what’s happening in your home area?
