Exit Cashgate, enter Tractorgate?
Some people in Malawi may not have heard about it, but we, Joyce Befu, Native Authority Mandela, Sheikh Jean-Philippe Le Poisson Sc, Innocett Mawayawaya and I, did. Some Malawians may not have read about, but we did. Some may not remember it, but we do. Some may not care about it, but we do.
We say this without any fear of self-contradiction. And we will not retract it, even if teargas was fired into our eyes and mouths. Bluntly speaking, we are poor partly because we, the owners of this country, have been short-changed and robbed but we are not ready to rise up and challenge the robbers. We are poor because our memories are very short. We are poor because we do not want to examine our past and learn from it to build a solid future. The truth is that we have been impoverished by our leaders, our governments, our civil servants, our parliamentarians, our journalists, our bankers and our policy makers.
Our tragedy is that our leaders and governments are more interested in self-serving politics than in the empowerment and improvement of the poor. Our leaders and governments know that they are the real causes of our poverty. Our tragedy is that our leaders choose who to listen to and what to hear.
Our tragedy is that, with the exception of nurses, teachers and a few honest police officers, our civil servants do not even work. Go to Capital Hill in Lilongwe. There, the directors and principal secretaries come to work at 11.00am only to knock off for lunch at 12.00 and never to come back. Yet, they are paid hefty salaries, accommodated in expensive houses, driven in posh vehicles and allocated 2000 litres of fuel. Do some government ministries need both directors and principal secretaries?
Our tragedy is that our journalists are too busy with mundane events. Despite years of training, Malawi’s journalism has still a long, very long way to go. While our fishermen were drowning on Lake Malawi, our journalists were busy speculating who would be in President Peter Mutharika’s Cabinet. While our fishermen were being buried in nondescript graves, our journalists found no time to ask the Department of Disaster Preparedness why it did act to rescue and merely search and help to identify the dead whose bodies were floating on the Lake for days. The journalism of proposals and solutions is not there yet. And that is our tragedy. Why did the death of so many, some say up to 50, people just pass like an ordinary event? Does this country have a coastguard?
Our tragedy is that our parliamentarians do very little research. The Malawi Congress Party does not even know that 20 years ago it left behind enough tractors, ploughs and other farm tools. The UDF knows and acknowledges this. The UDF, too, left behind enough farm machinery to mechanise and improve our agricultural production.
Our tragedy is that no one investigating corruption in Malawi seems to care that between 2010 and 2012 the DPP government got 177 tractors and 144 maize shellers worth $55 million and $40 million for a sugar processing plant under the Greenbelt Initiative. Both loans are repayable to India in 40 years.
Our tragedy is that our journalists, our parliamentarians, our political party leaders, our church leaders, our farmer organisations and farmers themselves do not want to ask where all these assets are or went. If these 177 tractors and 144 maize shellers were deployed equitably, hand-hoe agriculture would have been a thing of the past.
Some people allege that these farm assets were distributed and are now owned by individuals with connections to past and present regimes.
We are all aware of Cashgate and it is on its way out; but how about Tractorgate?
