While we have upwards of 18 million consumers in Malawi, you can count Malawian producers on your fingers, with some fingers left over. By production is meant value addition here. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that we have a consumers’ association but not a producers’ association, as I pointed out in my last article.
It follows that the bulk of what Malawian consumers consume is not from Malawi. My heart bleeds when I visit Malawian supermarkets and notice that the shelves are full of imported items. Yes, there will be a few packets of local biscuits, a few bottles of local cooking oil, some local tablets of soap, many loaves of local bread, some local eggs and sometimes some local vegetables, but that is as far as one can go in terms of local products. The rest of the goods will have a foreign origin, meaning that forex will have been used in getting them.
As things stand, experiencing forex shortages problems is actually the default status. It is a direct result of exporting too little and importing too much. We have to work on both problems, and do so with urgency.
The second problem is probably the easier one to work on, in the short term. We have to tame our insatiable appetite for imported goods so that we reduce the pressure on the little forex that we manage to generate through the exportation of farm produce.
The tendency to look down on locally made goods should be kicked out. The perceived low quality of local goods is, more often than not, just a mental construction. I have stated in one or more of my past articles that a Malawian once travelled to the USA on official business. While there, he bought gift items to be presented to some of his friends upon his return. One of those items was a shirt, which looked elegant to him. When his friend received it, he noticed that it had a Robin Bridge label. Robin Bridge was a brand of Crown Fashions, a factory in Limbe.
We should be proud of our products, even though some of them may look a bit crude. The satellite dish that I use was bought in 1977. It is bigger and bulkier than most of the dishes I see around. It is fixed on a stand that needs to be planted into the ground and get anchored with a heavy concrete block. The body of the dish is not a sheet of metal but a wire gauze, for a special reason: the vastness of the dish would make it susceptible to constant position changes as a result of wind blowing onto it, and this would affect the quality of the signal. With gauze material on the dish, the wind simply passes through without exerting significant pressure on it. What attracted me to this dish is precisely what would have repelled the average Malawian: it was locally made. Somebody was fashioning them in Thyolo that time.
We need to learn to be proud of local products rather than discredit them for all manner of feeble reasons. I am aware that people say many unpalatable things about our satellite dish but does not subtract from the fact that we enjoy excellent quality from it even though it has now clocked twenty-five years.
One of the greatest guzzlers of forex in Malawi is the fertilizer subsidy program. The earlier we switched to something different the better for us. The authorities just have to hold the bull by the horns and make a decision to terminate the program. Of course they need to find a suitable alternative to it. It is better, in my view, to forego short term popularity in order to gain longer term popularity.
The whole idea of using imported inorganic fertilisers in perpetuity should be revisited with a sober mind. We have been made to believe that our soils cannot produce anything unless inorganic fertilizer is applied. This is simply not true. A colleague, who is a Bunda graduate, made pellets of organic fertilizer, which he applied to his maize field some six years ago. He got as much yield as he had gotten from inorganic fertilizer, bursting the myth that we cannot get anything from our soil without inorganic fertilizer.
Organic fertilizer can easily and cheaply be made locally. Going that route will not only make the commodity way cheaper than is the case with inorganic fertilizers, but it will also reduce the pressure on our forex reserves.
We have a great deal of searching within to do to come up with practical way of generating forex and preserving it.