Last week I discussed the unstable currency that we have in this country. I stated that this was the case because we do not create adequate foreign reserves. Notice the all inclusive “we” in that statement. It is all of us together, those in government and those outside of government, that should create foreign reserves for mother Malawi.
Many people think that is the responsibility of government, and in particular the President, to bring in forex to Malawi, thereby ensuring a stable currency.
Agreed, government should not falter on its mandate to deliver good services to the citizenry and none of the officials in government should sleep on duty. They should, in fact, be taken to task if their conduct is not in tandem with the tennets of good governance.
It must be understood, however, that politicians do not create wealth. Private citizens do. It is what we, as private citizens, do or do not do that will ultimately be responsible for wealth creation. True, we do not control the do these things. But, at best, politicians will only create an enabling environment so that the private citizens can do what they best do, which is to create wealth.
America is probably the most advanced economy in the world today, but it did not get where it is because of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush. These, and numerous other politicians, did their part in creating the enabling environment in which people like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Wilbur and O’ville Wright, and more recently, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and thousands if not millions of other private individuals, unleashed their potential to propel America to very high economic heights.
In Britain, it is people like George Stevenson, the inventor of the railway, who contributed a great deal to the industrial revolution that catapulted Britain to the top of industrialised country. When I was a boy, almost everything I saw that was made had been made in England. We had cars like Ford Cortina, Consair, Anglia Zephyr, also Austin, Vauxhall, Morris; and all of these were British. Even the trucks were mostly British – Bedford, Ford, Leyland, Thames Trader, Albion. Some of the brand names for these vehicles were names of people, the people that had founded the companies that manufactured them. And these were not politicians. Britain developed more because of the efforts of these people than because of the efforts of the Winston Churchill’s or the Margaret Thatchers of this world, remarkable though these politicians had turned out to be.
If Jamaica has been making a bit of money, I can vouch that it is not so much as a result of the efforts of people like Michael Manley or Edward Seaga or indeed other politicians, as the efforts of Winston Rodney, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, Bob Marley, or Joseph Hill; reggae, rather than politics, happens to be one of the huge sources of forex for Jamaica even today.
I can give numerous other examples to show that private citizens can make or break a country’s economy. We need to cultivate habits that will help strengthen rather than debilitate the economy. I have lamented the huge insatiable appetite for foreign goods by many Malawians in my articles of four or five years ago. If some Malawians had their way, they would import sand from China for the construction of their houses, and would openly brag about it.
In 2015 I lost an uncle who had been living in Harare. As we waited at Dedza border post for the arrival of the remains, I saw a number of trucks loaded with planks of timber on the queue of vehicles waiting to be cleared so that they would enter Mozambique. I asked my brother in law where these trucks and their cargo could be heading to. “The planks must be going to China,” he responded. I could visualise in my mind Malawian timber getting into China, being assembled into articles of furniture, some of which would be exported back to Malawi to be sold at several times the price of the original timber. In fact some overzelous Malawians would travel to China and buy such furniture for use in their homes or offices. And Malawians expect to keep a stable currency that way? My foot!
Every one of us should think of ways of generating forex while guarding against the needless draining of our foreign reserves on things that can be produced locally. We must search within our habits and uproot those that would break our fragile economy. It is our, not the politicians’, economy.