We cannot embrace blackouts, Mr Kunkuyu

Spending the past 12 months abroad was a privilege which I wanted to fully exploit as a columnist because it was a one-off chance that enabled me to take a bird’s eye view of the socio-political environment of my country and pass a fair comment.

I am now back and it is time to assess whether what I got in the media while abroad corresponds to what obtains on the ground and the reality is stark that it smacked me right into the face.

The Malawi I left is the same dreary Malawi that I found but with the spirit of our people downcast and nearly broken due to daily ravages of poverty made worse now by a poorly handled economy that has tolerated the tripling or quadrupling of prices of all essential products and passed it as a necessary pain before things get better, the only diference being that it is taking forever.

Sadly, the politicians into whose hands these state of affairs were entrusted are not inspiring either. On the contrary, they waste people’s precious time, asking Malawians to take it on the chin and move on to accept mediocrity in the name of patriotism.

I cannot imagine the horror Malawians that have any sense of standards must have felt, as I did, when I read, upon arrival, that Moses Kunkuyu is asking us to embrace electiricity blackouts that Escom is implementing with unprecedented efficiency because in his view, they are here to stay.

To the Information Minister and his ilk, I say this: Malawians cannot, under any extenuating circumstances, accept blackouts because doing so is tantamount to accepting the utter nonsense of mediocrity.

To Kunkuyu, I say if Malawians were to accept the rubbish of the incessant Escom blackouts as a way of life, it would show that they have no sense of standards that they must embrace any whipping at the hands of a deeply inefficient parastatal but whose top brass is being paid loads of money to fund their extravagant tastes while they do absolutely nothing in the provision of a seamless service to a people groaning under the weight of an ever-increasing extravagant regime.

Escom’s failure to provide electricity to consumers is a straightforward problem that borders on lack of visionary leadership and forward planning. You do not need to go to anybody’s business school to work out that Escom is now suffering the pangs of failure to plan an efficient energy supply to a growing population.

What the parastatal is doing now to tweak this and that machine to the great annoyance of the suffering public is only a dismal fire-fighting measure to increase capacity. It is common knowledge that those machines were installed decades ago even before some of us were ushered into this world.

Why no one replaced them is anybody’s guess. What I know for a fact, though, is that that somebody did not have standards at Escom to take the bull by its horns and implement a plan that could have replaced the machines and we are now paying the price with the Kunkuyus of this world asking us to accept it and move on.

Never mind the fact that some countries are now using new technologies to deliver other energy sources such as extracting gas from the bowels of the earth using latest methods of fracking, again to pass the benefits to their consumer while keeping the prices low.

Yet, Escom is still contending with tweaking the machines, an endless endeavour that has not benefitted consumers as they are yet to see whether a new project with the US Millenium Challenge Account will bear any fruit or it will be the latest in a string of past white elephants that have impacted on no one.

But make no mistake, it is possible to have an endless supply of energy as those that have stayed in countries like the UK or US will attest. I spent 12 solid months in the UK and there was no single day when I went home after a hard student day to be greeted by a flat that had no electricity, water or gas. Any deviation, which I never experienced, is deemed a crisis and, as it happens in all crises, heads roll to make people accountable to the system.

Pessimists would dismiss this as comparing beans to maize. True, but the beginning point for them were standards which they set at very high. At the moment, we do not have any and, with the encouragement of politicians such as Kunkuyu, they want to go further by breaking the spirit of our people to accept mediocrity and treat blackouts as a norm rather than an exception.