Last weekend, social media was flooded with images of thousands of job seekers attending interviews for Health Surveillance Assistant (HSA), Statistical Clerk and Hospital Attendant posts at the Ministry of Health (MoH).
The scenes painted a bleak picture of broken dreams. Graduates, who spent years pursuing higher education in universities and colleges, showed up and scrambled for the low-tier public health roles designed for Malawi School Certificate of Education (MSCE) holders— clearly all victims of a worsening unemployment crisis.
As for how many will be recruited, I have no idea, but make no mistake. These healthcare workers are crucial bridges between the MoH policy and Malawians. They are trained and entrusted with life-saving tasks, including disease surveillance, immunisation, distributing contraceptives and tracking TB and HIV cases.
Come the interview day, we all stood there and watched as our future leaders jostled for crumbs at the youth unemployment rallies disguised as open-air interviews. What else could you expect from a society that gave up long ago on creating dignified spaces for its educated youth to truly belong? Meanwhile, Capital Hill also gave people free tickets to watch a system that produces graduates the job market has no plan for.
Beyond those chaotic scenes, something deeper unfolded. We saw pictures and videos documenting decades of systematic neglect and policy failure. How successive regimes have failed to protect, prepare and position young people, not merely as leaders-in-waiting, but as active agents of transformative leadership and economic progress.
The entire spectacle was not just a betrayal of the Malawi 2063 vision, which places our youth at the centre of national transformation as engines of an inclusively wealthy, self-reliant and industrialised Malawi 38 years from now.
Look around! Classrooms in primary and secondary schools are bursting with hope. But the streets overflow with disillusioned graduates who have no jobs and no direction. Even the private sector cannot create meaningful jobs to absorb them all.
How then do we talk of national transformation when a generation is fast losing itself?
Sadly, some youths numb their frustrations in cheap beers and dangerous drugs, gamble and engage in transactional sex because, claiming that in today’s Malawi, dignity has become a luxury very few people can afford. Of course, I disagree. While the pain is real, nothing justifies self-destruction.
The consequences of these actions are everywhere. HIV infections are rising. So are silent cases of depression, suicide, mental breakdowns, gangs and drug cartels. This is what long-term unemployment can do to countries sometimes. It feeds on self-worth, crushing potential and promise into pain while leaders smile for the cameras, pretending all is well.
Therefore, my call to politicians, policymakers and all those with a mandate and means to create jobs is simple: stop manufacturing excuses. Start manufacturing real jobs for all Malawians. This country stands on the shoulders of its youth, and cannot continue churning out graduates from universities and colleges only to dump them at the gates of unemployment. That’s not nation-building. It’s betrayal!
And without urgent , deliberate and strategic action to create more jobs, the promises of Malawi 2063 will remain just that—attractive on paper, but meaningless in practice. Because young people don’t just need a job. No. They need the right jobs. Those that align with their skills or reflect their ambitions and honour the training they have worked so hard to attain. From engineering to education, health to technology, journalism to entrepreneurship, etc.
Otherwise, the writing is already on the wall for Malawi: neglect the youth today, and this betrayal won’t just cost us. It will eat us alive!
