My Turn

Take our cities back

Chileka International Airport in Blantyre is a farce. Earlier this year, the runway developed gapping potholes so severe planes had to be diverted mid-air to the safety of Kamuzu International Airport in Lilongwe. Then president Joyce Banda rushed to Chileka to inspect the patched potholes and to promise the construction of a new airport. She went further: labour for the construction of the new airport would be drawn from the hordes of the unemployed people from the villages of Chileka.

But all that was talk. What we have for a terminal at Chileka instead is a grey, unfinished building which has been under construction for close to two years now. Construction is progressing in fits and starts and no one knows when this small building will ever be completed.

Rundown downtown Blantyre is no better. It is hard to believe, but Blantyre was once one of the cleanest cities in Africa. Then we lost it all. Now vendors are everywhere, rubbish lies uncollected for days on end, vehicles are left parked anyhow and minibus drivers and their attendant call-boys are a menacing law unto themselves.

The country elected city councillors just the other day. Whether it will make a blind bit of difference in the lives of people of Ndirande and Bangwe, Mchesi and Kawale, Zolozolo and Mchengawatuwa, Chikanda and Matawale remains to be seen. The optimists say that it is a wonderful thing that we now have mayors for Blantyre, Lilongwe, Mzuzu and Zomba. Maybe it is. I just hope it will not be a quick return to business as usual in running the affairs of these cities.

How a city feels about itself is very much like how a company feels about itself. If the management is competent and self-confident and cares about the service it provides then the workforce feels inspired and the company prospers. Go to a successful company and you can smell their success at the reception desk. The truth is that most of our cities have been badly managed over the years by a combination of rudderless leadership and incompetents that it is hardly any wonder we have vendors who now own and run the streets.

But elsewhere on this continent, there are cities that work.

Kigali, that city in a country of a thousand hills, is one I love more than most. Rwanda’s rise from the Armageddon is simply startling. There, the grass verges next to the roadways are green and tidy, there are no potholes in the roads, traffic lights work, traffic flows smoothly, the city itself is clean and well cared for and the overall impression you get is that of a well-run municipality as opposed to the atrocious mess successive governments have made of our cities. Every time that I have been to Kigali, I have returned inspired. I see in Kigali the city that Blantyre could have been and, in Rwanda, the country mine should be.

The other city I love is Windhoek, which exploded on my heart when I lived there for three months in 2006. Windhoek was clean and groovy and uncluttered and happening and functional.

Our new mayors and their councillors should relish the challenge to clean up our cities. The hope is that they are people whose spine is made of the kind of stuff needed to do what is difficult, but necessary.

One of the reasons vendors who litter the streets have not been handled more firmly is because they are gullible electoral cannon fodder for the politicians. If they were removed and put away in designated places, then politicians would no longer have a desperate constituency to go to with lies in exchange for votes at every election period.

So, cleaning up the city streets will not be easy and the solution won’t be simple, but it has to be done. If nothing is done now, Malawi will be left counting the cost for years to come.

Over the years, Malawians have developed a distinctly cynical attitude towards political authority. They see politicians scanning around in fancy cars and they know that only a few connected cronies are splitting the spoils among themselves.

Still, we have to take our cities back from all rogue elements.

The author likes to comment on social issues.

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