Of course, it is a crisis

Malawians do not need IMF or anybody else to tell them whether or not Cashgate is a national crisis.

Of course, it is and those who think otherwise are out of their mind and perhaps merit a date at a psychiatric hospital to check their mental status and ascertain what substances they have been inhaling lately.

When billions of money paid into the national treasury by decent and law abiding Malawians is routinely stolen by a connected cabal of sickos, resulting in poor public service delivery and poor people dying like maggots in hospitals, it cannot be sweet-coated into anything else because its rightful name is a crisis.

When you have public infrastructure that is in a constant state of disrepair because money to fix it has been stolen by heartless thieves, then you have nothing else on your hands but a crisis.

You know the system is rotten when you have a whole government ministry paying in top dollar for unplanned expensive buses only for the same ministry to disown them, saying there was no vote for it. That, by all standards, is a crisis!

There is no need, therefore, for Malawians to waste each other’s time debating the semantics behind the word crisis because it is obvious we are right in the middle of one and a big one at that.

We should be spending time on how we should get out of it and it is where we begin to part ways.

While civil society organ-isations (CSOs) have taken an ultra radical stand that include a call for formation of an interim government of unity and the boycott of taxes, the PP government insists that it is on top of things and that all those suspected to have played a hand in this criminal act against the people of Malawi will fully account for the their actions in the court of law.

Perhaps the CSOs have overplayed their hand in view of the fact that there is no need to destabilise governm-ent when elections are only six months away but the fact remains that it cannot be business as usual and unless something drastic and revolutionary happens, Malawi will always be poor.

The issue at hand is so fundamental to the future of Malawi. It is a single issue that has made us poor and always carrying a begging bowl to donors. This is a national humiliation that we have endured for so long and somehow it must stop.

When former president Bingu wa Mutharika said Malawi is not poor but its people are, he must have known that we produce enough for ourselves but some greedy people want it all and routinely steal it.

The tragedy is that Mutharika joined the bandwagon of these looters and went to his grave with a cool K61 billion fleeced from poor people.

We all agree this nonsense cannot go on and I will repeat the mantra I have been singing for the past weeks: unless Malawians rise up to put a full stop to this, our country is doomed while others are moving forward.

Whether it entails voting the right way in six months time or something more drastic, I honestly do not give a damn.

What Malawians want is that their hard earned tax money—all of it to the last tambala—should be used for public service delivery and not to enrich a few with connections.