Reading Time: 3 minutesLast week I focused on attribute of followership, namely courage. This week we shall discuss one more important attribute, namely competency. As a country we are desperately wanting in this attribute. There is no denying that we have a number of competent individuals in various fields, in Social and Natural Sciences, Engineering, Accountancy, Medicine and […]

Reading Time: 3 minutesOne of our democratic presidents said that leading a country was no child play, meaning that it was not for the fainthearted. An organization or a nation can stand or fall depending on how it is led. This is how central leadership is to the running of the affairs of a family, a village, an

Reading Time: 3 minutesI have heard people say History is difficult because it requires you to remember the years in which certain events took place. David Livingstone set his eyes on Lake Malawi in 1859; Henry Henderson established Blantyre Mission in 1876; the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1912; Kamuzu

Reading Time: 3 minutesIf I was asked what I considered to be the greatest problem vexing Malawi, I would probably single out the shortage of forex. I have seen it coming over a number of years. I remember writing some ten or so years ago about our supermarkets being stuffed with a disproportionate number of foreign goods in

Reading Time: 3 minutesI have stated elsewhere that as a youths growing up at Nkhoma Mission, my brother and I made several attempts to construct a bulb from thin wire extracted from the gauze placed on windows to prevent mosquitoes getting in. A coil was made from this thin wire and placed in a bottle with the two

Reading Time: 3 minutesThrough the debates that we used to hold on a variety of topics, we got to know many new English words. Many of them were real words; few, however, were fake words, being made up by the speakers. I remember one speaker once unleashing a word which did not sound real: diskomkwinya. It was a

Reading Time: 3 minutesWhile we are busy searching within and focusing our attention internally we must not forget that others are searching without, peering at the skies to find out what lies beyond our world. The only extra-terrestrial body to have been visited by humans is the Moon. The first man on the Moon was neil Armstrong who

Reading Time: 3 minutesWhen an extraordinary son of a carpenter from Nazareth called his followers two thousand years ago, he did not promise them the Moon. His message was very simple: “I will make you fishers of men”. In one case he even issued the warning that “foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of

Reading Time: 3 minutesWe commemorate Kamuzu Day today in honour of the founding father of this nation. Not only was Kamuzu a true Malawian, contrary to what some would have us believe, but he was the architect of the nation. There was no country called Malawi before Kamuzu came back home from a 40-year sojourn in the white

Reading Time: 3 minutesThat we have daunting economic problems in Malawi is well documented and needs no further elaboration. Almost all our economic indicators – foreign exchange rates, interest rates, inflation rates – are critically unfavourable. And there is no indication that they will take a swing any time soon. When I last checked, the Kwacha rate to