Welcome to Malawi at 52
Hon Folks, Malawi at 52 invokes mixed feelings. There’s the pride of being independent the value of which, if you asked me, is simply priceless.
The difficult part is to answer what’s there to show for it? You can point at a road here, a school and a hospital there but where in Africa, save perhaps for war-torn and failed states, is infrastructure less developed?
Honestly, I find our measure of development, hinging on chitukuko or infrastructural development, too simplistic if not outright inadequate, especially as a measure of successful leadership.
As I keep on saying, this chitukuko is 80 percent donor-funded anyway so real leadership is probably on ensuring that the aid is effectively used for the intended purpose, as much as possible arresting fraud and corruption as well as eliminating inefficiencies to avoid cost overruns and corruption.
Using this measure, there’s very little, if any, to show for our 52 years of being an independent sovereign State. Our leaders—from Kamuzu Banda, Bakili Muluzi, Bingu wa Mutharika, Joyce Banda to the incumbent, Peter Mutharika—have shown a penchant for self-praise for policies that have only entrapped in a cycle of abject poverty.
The recurrent side of our expenditure blue-print has equally been flawed as priority has always been on nurturing the make-believe God on earth status of the President and cronies in government at the expense of the population, now over 16 million and consistently growing.
How do you justify allocating cabinet ministers 1 000 litres of fuel a month for travelling between their residences at Area 10 and offices at the Capital Hill, a five-minute distance?
How do you justify their flying business or first class, paying twice or more the economy-class fare as they globe-trot to speak for us, the world poorest using the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita measure?
How do you justify the huge allowances the President, Cabinet ministers and other big fish in government wrap their seemingly modest salaries in when the people they represent die needlessly in public hospitals devoid of basic drugs and even a meal of mgaiwa and beans or vegetables?
Can the Prado VX or TX really be a substitute for Mercedes Benz when the majority of the citizens, who are heavily taxed for government to finance such opulence, live on less than a dollar a day and half the population are on the verge of starving to death?
Talk about tax. Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe said when presenting the 2016/17 National Budget that MRA, the expert tax collector, estimated to collect K698 billion this year but government, on assumption that the economy would grow by 5.1 percent, hiked the tax revenue target to K708.8 billion.
Citizens, including Economics Association of Malawi (Ecama) and Malawi Economic Justice Network (Mejn) questioned the basis of that assumption in a year when half the population is food insecure and when inflation is above 20 percent and interest rates hovering above 40 percent.
While Gondwe tried to authenticate his wild growth projections by attributing them to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank announced while Parliament was still scrutinising the budget, the depressing news that the Malawi economy is likely to grow by a paltry 2.6 percent this year.
Interestingly, MPs, driven by a vested interest to have the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) hiked from K12 million to K18 million, arm-twisted Gondwe to inflate his already unrealistic budget by K8.6 billion!
Instead of persuading government to recast its priorities and accommodate their interests within the set domestic revenue projections, a compromise was reached simply by bloating an already unrealistic budget.
Welcome to Malawi at 52!
