Leadership we can’t believe in

Malawi is burning and what do the two people we expect to lead us out of the inferno doing? The top one, President Joyce Banda, has just scooped a K308 million bounty from the Treasury, gathered a 40-plus crowd of friends and family, interspersed with a few technical people to cover her back, calmly walked out of the thick smoke without a backward glance and jumped on the first flight out of Blantyre to New York in the United States (US).

She has left a trail of angry, burning and desperate people struggling to beat the raging fire. While in the US, she will attend the United Nations (UN) General Assembly to participate in a boring talk shop, bask in the glare of being one of the few female heads of State, pick up an insignificant award, shake a few hands, pose for photographs and return home after three weeks to a suffering nation still trapped in the hellhole.

That is what the whooping K308 million will buy for one of the poorest countries in the world boasting a huge public finance hole yawning to be filled. It is a very bad deal.

It becomes worse when you start asking what those traditional leaders are doing in New York. What about those singing women and morale chaps? Why should those numerous aides to Cabinet Ministers and the President be part of the entourage?

It seems that for the Banda administration, that is one good example of how to implement an austerity budget that can only be modelled on an Economic ‘Redundancy’ Plan (ERP), which cannot recover, as the administration claims, anything from the blazing house called Malawi.

The second in command, the fellow that President Banda left behind to run the country, Vice-President Khumbo Kachali, has been busy trying to worsen people’s eye-popping suffering from a distance.

While at it, he has also been insulting our mothers and everyone who is unhappy with the pair’s globe-trotting and in-country criss-crossing.

As if that were not enough, Kachali has presided over his Ministry of Health’s snatching of beds from Mponela Hospital to his home area’s Mzimba District Hospital where there are two parliamentary by-elections that could define the political landscape for the People’s Party (PP) less than two years to the 2014 general elections.

Following a barrage of criticism over his misadventures, the Vice-President apologised after some days and now claims to be investigating his own ministry for the bed-gate scandal. Apparently, Kachali was not aware of such an important decision.

I don’t believe him of course, but I am also not surprised that he would take that route to save his political skin.

These two leaders of ours—Banda and Kachali—are quite a pair, complementing each other as they get better and better at mismanaging this country, beating even the late president Bingu wa Mutharika for the honour.

It took Mutharika at least six years to start wrecking the country. It has only taken the Joyce Banda administration less than five months, a record by any standards that is pushing the country further towards a fiscal cliff.

Things are getting out of control, with Britain and Germany now unlikely to give us aid until 2015, citing governance worries as the reason. Even those sticking with us are not going to give us as much money as we expected in the 2012/13 national budget.

The implications of such aid cuts to the fiscal plan are not too hard to imagine, but that could be a subject for another day.

The underlining issue is that donors are no longer interested to see ruling politicians fattening themselves with their (donor) money while the poor, the intended beneficiaries of support from development partners, are being starved as sacrificial lambs.

That is why the statement by the chairperson of the Common Approach to Budget Support (Cabs) Asbjørn Eidhammer, who is also Norwegian Ambassador to Malawi, is very poignant.

“Sacrifices have to be made and I think it is important from our [donors’] point of view that although we assist in mitigating those sacrifices and the negative impact particularly on the poor, everybody will have to be prepared to sacrifice and that goes in particular also for the privileged,” Eidhammer said.

Coming from such a senior and experienced diplomat—someone specifically good at choosing words carefully—that is a telling statement.

The whole Eurozone, including presidencies and monarchs, are sacrificing some of their comforts so that their people and those they help in poor countries, should have a better life.

Why shouldn’t leaders of a donor-depent nation such as Malawi do the same for its citizens and the international community that contributes to their State coffers?

That is the question most Malawians have been asking on radios, social media, newspapers, in minibuses and any other platform.

But that question, instead of being answered, is being met with personal insults from the leadership directed at critics—and our mothers. That is leadership we cannot believe in.