What set England and eventually the entire British Isles apart from the rest of the countries in the world, turning them into a world power is the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Several British entrepreneurs invested in new and innovative ways of making goods.
The textile industry was one of the earliest to undergo this revolution. Using new spinning methods powered by water, tons of cotton were consumed to make cloth. Britain, like most people will appreciate, is too cold to grow cotton. All the cotton was consequently imported from places like Africa and South America.
The poor farmer grew his cotton in Africa, exported it to England for a pittance, then had to buy expensive clothes made from his cotton. This trend has continued to this day. I remember the proliferation of catalogues by means of which Malawians could order all manner of garments from Manchester and other English cities in the 1970s through to the 1980s.
Farmers grow tobacco in Malawi, sell it at prices set by the buyer, then it gets exported as a raw commodity to Europe or Asia or the Americas, where it is processed into cigarettes. Some of those cigarettes come back here and are sold at prices set not by the buyer this time round but by the vendor.
A few yeas ago I went to Dedza border post to welcome the body of an uncle who had died in Harare. I saw a number of trucks on a queue to cross the border. Some of those trucks were loaded with timber. I asked a colleague where the timber could be heading to and I was told that it was, in all likelihood, going to China.
Raw timber gets exported to China, where it is converted to sofa sets, among other goods. Malawians travel to China to import sofa made from their own timber and while they are at it, jobs are created in China, forex is generated for China while it severely eludes of Malawians.
Somehow our priorities are totally wrong, and we do not even seem to notice it, much less do something about it. The least we can do is stop the irresponsible importation of goods that can be made locally from local materials.
What would be even more useful would be to encourage manufacturing of goods locally. It has been stated many times by some of our leaders that we need to start adding value to our commodities.
Somebody once said one should imagine going to a trade show, where one finds two people displaying their goods with the possibility that members of the public could buy those goods. Now if one has lots of raw cotton and the other has cotton designer suits, where would you expect to find a long queue? Your guess is as good as mine, I am sure.
What distinguishes cotton from suits is that the former is a raw commodity while the latter is a commodity to which much value has been added. Buyers simply do not care about raw commodities. That is why they would have the audacity to buy such commodities at prices dictated by themselves not by the seller. Every year the tobacco markets close during the selling seasons because the sellers are not happy with prices offered by the buyers. Who is supposed to set prices between the buyer and the seller? If I go to any supermarket, I will find that the seller has already determined the prices that the goods will be sold at.
As long we continue to rely on raw commodities, others will take advantage of us by giving us unreasonable terms in trade. We need to graduate into adding value to commodities and selling items over which we have control in terms of pricing. Achieving this requires us to do two things, namely to develop a culture that encourages and respects manufacturing and to refrain from irresponsibly importing things that can be produced locally.
I once visited Trieste, a city in northern Italy and was surprised to find so many Fiat Unos in the city streets. You hardly see a Japanese car there. I was surprised because Fiat Uno is not a particularly prestigious car. There are many cars in the world that would easily outclass the Uno in terms of prestige. But the Italians still prefer the Uno to the other makes because it is their own. That is called patriotism.
We do not need to search very deeply within our contemporary culture to discover that we have a great deficiency of patriotism in Malawi.