Do we really know our problems?
Imissed the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Hardtalk on Monday when Zeinab Badawi was speaking to President Peter Mutharika.
However, I managed to download the podcast and listened to the interview.
During the interview, she raised many pertinent issues that have made me to reflect deeply on why Malawi has failed to progress economically.
There is no denying however that Malawi can, and should do much better economically.
The President singled out three challenges namely, Cashgate, donor withdraw and floods as being the key factors that have disadvantaged his leadership, stressing that he is the only President in the history of Malawi to have been faced with these three challenges at once. While I agree that these might be our current challenges, I doubt they are the root problems. In fact, two of them were fully known to him prior to his ascension to the presidency. The floods would, therefore, be the only challenge that he might not have anticipated. But again, knowing how we have carelessly been destroying our trees and vegetation, no one should be too surprised that Malawi has made itself a disaster prone nation.
I am therefore assuming that all the three challenges have not taken our President by surprise. I am deeply disturbed that as a nation, we seem to use Cashgate as the main scapegoat to explain our economic malaise. Yes, some K24billion was syphoned from government coughers, but that is less than 3 percent of our 2015/2016 approved national budget. There is no denying that Cashgate was one glaring evil of 2013, but it is surely not the major cause of our perennial economic challenges.
Zeinab quoted a Malawian academic, Jimmy Kainja, as saying about 35 percent of government funds have been stolen in the past decade. That will be about K270 billion stolen from the 2015/2016 national budget. Sadly, our public financial management system is still leaking badly and it is why donors have preferred to channel their financial support to Malawi off budget. We must be deeply concerned that two years after cashgate, donors still do not trust our ability to properly manage and account for money.
Responding to the issue of the presidential jet which was bought under the leadership of the late Bingu Wa Mutharika, our President said Joyce Banda sold it and indirectly asked Zainab to ask her about it, “she sold it and we don’t know where she sold it to and we don’t know where the proceeds went, and that is something we are investigating”. This brings me to the second major challenge we have as a nation: It seems it is too easy for people to get away with “stealing”.
If indeed the President does not know where and to who Joyce Banda sold our national asset, and he still does not know where the proceeds went, more than 17 months after assuming the office of the President of the Republic of Malawi, then we have a very serious problem. We must be deeply concerned as citizens that there is probably no serious fight against corruption and theft of public resources in this nation.
Our problems are deeper than floods, Cashgate or withdraw of donor budgetary support. Until we find the root causes of our perennial economic challenges, we might be wasting time, fighting the wrong enemy and prescribing wrong economic solutions. Oh, one more thing, “everything rises and falls on leadership”. n
