If we just managed to do half of the things we talk about in Malawi, we would be a great economy and a great society. As they say, talk is cheap. It is unfortunate that we often do not match our talk with appropriate action.
There are two sides to this issue. The first side is the more straightforward one. It involves those in authority, those who control public resources. So much is expected from these people but so little gets accomplished. As a result, nearly everybody rises and points an accusing finger at them.
Politicians should learn to moderate their promises. More often than not they promise the Moon but what they deliver is something barely above Earth’s surface. In other words, there is a yawning chasm between what they say and what they do. This is one of the major causes of the unrelenting criticism that flies around, unabated.
As a country we have had beautiful plans to transform our society into a decent one – socially, economically, technologically. It has even been suggested that we would become another Malaysia or another Singapore, meaning that we would become a tiger economy like these Asian countries. Meanwhile, we continue to transact business in the usual way. Instead of preserving our forex reserves by turning to biofuels, for example, we have not bothered to follow up on the extensive research conducted by the Lilongwe Technical College several years ago with any tangible plans of action. Instead we have taken retrogressive steps in that field by disregarding the blending of petrol with ethanol, which was meant to reduce the imported component of our fuel. During Kamuzu’s time, it was mandatory for every fuel dealer to sell petrol that was blended with locally produced ethanol in the ratio 1:4.
While a Brazilian mining company operating in Mozambique hauls huge volumes of diesel by rail from Nacala Port, through Malawi, landing it in Moatize (near Tete) more cheaply than would have been the case if they hauled it by road, we still inexplicably fail to make use of the same infrastructure to land our fuel in Malawi more cheaply. Yes, we talk about it, but we do not follow through our talk with appropriate action. The roads to Beira and to Dar es Salaam are still littered with countless tankers carrying nothing on their outbound trips and bringing back diesel or petrol or paraffin.
Vision 2020 was a stark failure mainly because we did not put much action into its implementation. Nobody did anything to implement the otherwise beautiful vision. We now have Vision 2063. I am not a prophet of doom but it is obvious that unless we start implementing it in earnest now, by taking the necessary actions, it will meet the same fate as its predecessor.
The other side of the issue involves the private citizens, people like me, and many of my readers who are not in public office. We talk a lot, we demand a lot from those in authority, but do hardly anything to contribute to the wellbeing of the nation. “What can we do? We do not control the public resources,” would probably be the response from those that will have read this paragraph.
There is so much that private citizens can do. We can, for example, help minimize the rampant hemorrhage of our forex reserves by curbing our appetite for imports. Several articles ago, I featured Mr. Crispin Ng’oma, who visited India in 1971 while he was working for Noil. He and his team, which comprised young technocrats that had been drawn from various parts of the world, were surprised that at that time India had put a total ban on imports. This was meant to encourage Indians to think. And think they did. Today, Tata Motors, which was in its infancy in 1971, has taken over the manufacturing of Land Rover vehicles, among many other strides. Not only will our restraint from imports preserve our forex reserves, it will also usher us into a thinking mode to come up with amazing projects, albeit with humble and perhaps insignificant beginnings.
When prices of cooking oil skyrocketed two years ago, there was an uproar from everybody and the blame was placed squarely on Government. It was as if Government had touched the wrong economic buttons to trigger the price hike. No, it was the result of supply and demand conditions having been skewed away from supply, which had sharply fallen. We just needed to engage in local production. Private citizens simply needed to start converting Malawi’s plentiful soya into oil. Hardly anybody did. Lack of action did not help us.