Count people with disabilities in

For many years, persons with disabilities and their associates have been demanding rights which they quest for and equality in the society. With the passage of time, their demands were taken note by members of society.

However, despite some changes in attitude, persons with disabilities still face many challenges.

The positive attitude that the general public take towards persons with disabilities is somehow tokenistic. This is tokenism. The word, in disability issues, is a practice of pretending that there is an attempt to accommodate people with disabilities, but in fact not doing very much.

The disability movement is not homogenous—different groups of people with disabilities have different aims and fragmented.

Some members of the disability people organisations (DPOs) are being often left out of negotiations. This is typical case of tokenistic participation when a few randomly chosen disability organisations and individuals are invited to give their opinion on issues affecting them or a draft written by public officers and, to some extent, they are too late to make any substantial changes and there is lack of broad public consultation with all the relevant stakeholders.

Therefore, there is little or no impact to be made by DPOs.

Some inclusive schools are tokenistic. In this case, a school may enroll as many learners with disabilities as possible just to show that they are inclusive and more tolerant towards learners with disabilities. But there are a lot of shortcomings when turning it into practice. Teachers struggle to attend educational needs of learners with disabilities. In those schools, learners with disabilities do not produce satisfactory academic results.

As such accepting and enrolling learners with disabilities alone is bare minimum to make sure that learners with disabilities actually feel welcome. But teachers have to consider their own personal views and judgments; this has to take place before a teacher can even begin to monitor their classroom climate.

Now let us turn to conference and seminar organisers. Of late we have seen several organisations and universities engaging participants from diverse background.  It is very common to see persons with disabilities being invited.

However, the challenge is that in most cases persons with disabilities feel no sense of belonging; have no real responsibilities or duties, and are not expected to contribute substantively or, to some extent, freedom of movement is limited.

Here are some examples: some conference venues are on high floor. This is difficult for a wheel chair user or those who use clutches to get up. A person with visual impairment usually feel excluded from any interactions. Usually, such meetings do not provide Braille materials on minutes of previous meetings or agendas on their own.

A deaf participant relies on a sign language interpreter in order to fully participate in discussions. However, in most cases, conference or seminar organisers forget or intentionally avoid booking a sign language interpreter. Therefore, inviting a deaf participant without a sign language interpreter is rendering a deaf person’s attendance worthless.

Even though we have the 2012 Disability Act, which is our legislation, some new buildings still do not find it necessary to make their buildings accessible to persons with disabilities.

On television, I believe that tokenism is very present in the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation Television (MBCtv). It seems that MBCtv management feel like presence of sign language interpreters on their channel is compelled to show the world that they are taking into consideration members of deaf community thus not marginalising them. Despite having a sign language interpreter on MBCtv, there are many programmes that do not feature a sign language interpreter.