Cut the Chaff

Economy tanking as JB talks and talks

I am convinced that President Joyce Banda has suspended her half-hearted attempts at governing. What makes her day these days is getting as much public exposure as our taxes can allow, even using mundane activities to achieve that mediocre goal.

In recent days, she has been burning millions of kwacha in fuel and other presidential travel-related costs to play Santa two months before Christmas.

She went about personally distributing Joyce Banda-branded bags of maize, stealing what should have been the show of the Department of Disaster Management Affairs, district commissioners and their teams at councils.

Even if I gave her the benefit of the doubt and believe for one moment that the gesture was a personal donation—meaning the maize was not paid for by government money—I am sure her Joyce Banda Foundation has some personnel who could have handled that.

Banda’s love of the camera.

Every day, the President looks like someone groping in the dark, looking for keys to leadership that she cannot locate.

Frustrated, she has started screaming at the media and her critics (sounds very familiar as I recall scenes from episodes prior to April 5).

She claims that while the international community is behind her and is impressed with her performance, journalists and some local critics are blind to this reality.

What Mrs. Banda forgets is that she is not accountable to diplomats who have endorsed her stewardship when most Malawians think the country is heading in the wrong direction on her watch. The President does not also answer to self-serving and attention-seeking bodies that dish out awards just to gain cheap publicity.

She is accountable to Malawians and, unbelievably, a growing number of them are even nostalgic about the Bingu wa Mutharika days!

That speaks volumes about her performance whose major achievement is the simple task of ensuring that we have continuous fuel supply. But on pocket book issues and strategic challenges of the country, the President has fallen embarrassingly short.

Her administration also recently unveiled the skimpy Economic Recovery Plan (ERP), but do not want to sit down and supervise its implementation.

Instead, the relevant sector ministers and the President are going about attending little talk shops billed as economic summits where they are engaging in little chit-chats.

On Thursday, Mrs. Banda presided over a routine annual conference of the Economics Association of Malawi (Ecama) where chances are that the same people who attended the Inclusive Growth Conference in Lilongwe last week would also be there to say the same things over and over again.

My view is that anyone of the three—Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) Governor Charles Chuka, Finance Minister Dr. Ken Lipenga and Economic Planning and Development Minister Atupele Muluzi—could have delivered the key note address the President itched to convey. She should have been busy enough to delegate but, of course, she is not.

But as she travels around and enjoying the sound of her voice, the economy continues to ooze blood.

Last weekend, the Ministry of Finance announced the second downward revision in one month of the 2012 gross domestic product (GDP) number to a tepid 1.4 percent.

This came a month after RBM cut the official GDP estimate from 4.3 to 1.6 percent. It also came several months after I had predicted output that would be close to negative growth.

As the President goes around thumping her chest while ignoring the goings-on at Capital Hill, State coffers are being looted through dubious out-of-court payments; some of the K72 billion arrears are being paid without the promised verification and those facilitating the deals are tucking away percentage cuts—and getting fatter.

Yet, her administration is struggling to pay some civil servants on time and cannot buy medical equipment, citing lack of money. How come there seems to be a steady flow of cash for compensations, a good number of which are not even being contested for in court?

Mrs. Banda must stop running around and start running this country. She can pander to the international community for all we care, but Malawians want her to lead effectively.

For the next six months, it would be great to see the President operating from Capital Hill at her Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC).

That will help reassert her authority and send signals to unruly ministers and civil servants that the ‘big sister’ is watching.

The President cannot talk her way out of the problems we are in. She must work her way out of them.

 

 

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