“But many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice; and many shouted aloud for joy.” – Ezra 3:12
Two groups of people, the young and the old, beheled the same scene but reacted differently. The old people wept but the young shouted for joy. This was after some returnees had arrived in Jerusalem from Babylon, where they had spent years in captivity. They saw the same thing but perceived different things. The old had seen the old Solomonic temple and knew its splendor, which was far greater than what they were about to witness. This caused them to shed tears. The young people had not seen the previous temple, and to them, what was about to be erected was great, causing them to shout for joy.
When I accompany some people to large supermarkets in Blantyre or Lilongwe, a similar thing is usually experienced. While my colleagues admire, with intense joy, the well-stocked supermarkets, I get filled with sadness because, usually, I do not see any Malawian products in the shops. The same scene evokes two different emotions from two groups of people, something akin to the experience of two and a half thousand years ago in Jerusalem.
With the prevailing forex problems, it has been very difficult to keep the supermarkets well stocked. I remember, several times, having to change the type of crackers I consumed in the past year because what I bought in one week could not be found the following week. Shortage of forex has been hindering the timely restocking of many shop items.
Perhaps what has squeezed us so much is the suspension of the extended credit program by the IMF. Now that it is likely that we will see the resumption of that program, the forex situation will probably ease up. Maybe our supermarkets will restock nearly normally once again.
But wait a minute, should we rely on donations and foreign loans for our forex? God forbid! That, if truth be told, has been what we have relied on for a good part of the period we have existed as an independent nation. Little wonder when donors withhold aid, we get squeezed like a sponge. We need to break loose from this fettered situation.
The only way to do so is to make sure we do not conduct business as usual, but to conduct business unusual. If and when we get some forex from the IMF, or indeed from any other donor, let us religiously safeguard it by using it for those imports that will benefit the majority of our population. We must, this time round, use the forex to build our own capacity to generate forex so that we can break the vicious circle that we seem to be trapped in.
A number of the forex generating avenues that this country used to enjoy got obstructed over the past thirty or so years. The little forex we shall get in the coming months should help us unstop these avenues.
Genesis 26:18 says, “And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father, for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them”. We need to dig again the wells that used to give us forex and dig new ones so that we become self-sufficient in forex generation.
One of the avenues that got obstructed is the exportation of groundnuts. Malawian groundnuts used to get roasted and packaged in Wales for distribution to the rest of the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Dobadobas infiltrated the international groundnut trade and did not bother to stick to stipulated aflatoxin levels required on the international market. We lost the plot, as a result. With careful planning we can unstop this well, like we can a number of others. Export processing zones can be brought back to open up another blocked avenue. All these will require money, in some cases forex, but they will be worthwhile investments.
Among the new avenues we need to explore will be tertiary processing of our agricultural produce so that we get away from trading in commodities, as these fetch close to nothing. Like I have stated elsewhere, we need to stop regarding production workers as low class employees. Production is the goose that laid the golden egg. If there is one activity this country must value above everything else, it is production.