The opening line of a certain poem goes something like this: Two prisoners looked through the bars; One saw mud and other, stars. The same reality was interpreted differently, depending on each one’s attitudes. In the one case, the observer had a positive attitude and looked for something positive in the reality before him. He therefore saw stars. In the other case, the observer was full of negativity and saw mud. The celebrated author of a Leadership text book titled “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Steven Covey, said, “When we look at the world, we do not see it as it is but as we are.”
Many times people interpret the same reality differently depending on their attitudes and motives. What I will discuss in this article is Malawi’s level of development, as viewed through different lenses.
It has been intimated numerous times, for example, that Malawi has hardly achieved any development since independence. Some commentators have gone to the lengths of enunciating what Sir Colby and other colonial masters did in this country. The construction of Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QECH) and the planning of hydro power plants along the Shire often come up as some of the developmental projects of the pre-independence era.
While these, and others, were commendable projects, we must never lose sight of whatever else Malawi has achieved since that time. Rarely are our minds directed towards the many developments that have taken place at the said Queen Elizabeth Hospital since independence. How big was the hospital when it was built? How big is now? Or, more fundamentally, how many central hospitals did the country have then, and how many now? How many power stations were there pre-1964, and how many now?
While still discussing hospitals, the reader will appreciate that Lilongwe now has its own Central Hospital, the Kamuzu Central Hospital, or KCH for short (as do Mzuzu and Zomba), a far cry from the pre-independence era. I visited KCH earlier this year and had the chance to see how it, like QECH, has grown. I was meeting my son there. He was driving from Blantyre to meet somebody at one of the NGOs attached to the KCH facility. I had driven to Lilongwe a day earlier. I was told I would meet him near Lions Centre. I had to get directions to Lions Centre from vendors, the campus having developed into a very complex one, with institutions like Kamuzu College of Nursing and Bayor College of Medicine plus a multiplicity of health related NGOs, among other centres, within it. And all this development has happened post-independence.
As a boy, I lived in Lilongwe for two years. It was not even a city then. Yes, the Asian shops were there on both sides of Lilongwe River. Falls Estate was the sole medium density residential area, while Kawale, Mchesi and Biwi were the high density areas. The top notch areas were Kokri and what was known as “kuma Yard” (now area 3). That was Lilongwe then. My father was a warden at the CCAP Youth Hostel near what is now called Msonkhamanja Church. Beyond the church was Phwetekere, an area outside town which boasted at least one, probably more, gulewamkulu launching site(s) (dambwe). In my estimation, Lilongwe has grown 20 fold since that time. This is probably a very conservative estimate. All areas now referred to by numbers, such as Areas 9, 10, 11, 12….. errrr, there are more than 50 of such areas, are a recent addition to the city. They were never there in the 1960s, not to mention during the colonial era. Likuni was a Catholic Mission out of town and Dzenza was a CCAP Mission deep in Lilongwe rural. Both are now part of the ballooning metropolis.
At independence, Malawi’s only paved wide road connecting one town to another was that between Blantyre and Zomba. Paved single lane roads existed between Limbe and Mulanje (via Thyolo) and between Lilongwe and Salima. We have managed to pave more than two thousand kilometres (still counting) of roads since independence. When I was a student at Robert Blake Secondary School in Dowa in the late 1970s, the journey between Lilongwe and Dowa was not for the fainthearted. It would take close to two hours to cover the 50 kilometre distance, thanks to the dirt road between the two centres. By the time we got off the bus at Dowa Boma, we looked like we had just emerged from a burrow, for our bodies were covered with a thick layer of dust. I subsequently witnessed the paving of the M1 road between Lilongwe and Mzuzu in the late 1970s.