Let me be positive

August 12, 2014

In the spirit of being accountable to Malawians on his 10-day trip to the US, President Peter Mutharika said the right things on Tuesday that resonated well with some of us who are sometimes considered the harshest critics of this regime.

The President’s diagnosis that this country will only develop and move forward in the next 50 years, after the underdevelopment of the past half century, if it attracts heavy injection of foreign capital and general investment, was spot on and difficult to argue against.

My entrepreneur friend Louis Chiwalo can go on and on until cows come home over lunch at some place in Blantyre with me about the importance of protecting home-grown industries and entrepreneurship, but he cannot argue against the importance of big foreign investments coming into the country as they tend to create and stimulate demand that even help local entrepreneurs such as him to grow.

Also spot on was the President’s prescription that foreign investment can only be attracted if we have hard working technocrats in government who are proactive and deeply motivated to do their jobs of facilitating deals for willing investors and not the lazy bones that have filled up our civil service and draw salaries every month for doing nothing.

He then gave his ministers 30 days to come up with ways on how best their ministries and departments can woo investment, keeping in mind that “we can’t grow if we rely on foreign aid.”

As I said, all this makes good reading and is nice to the ear. In all fairness, the President exuded confidence during the press conference on Tuesday and gave an impression of someone firmly in control and knows what he is doing and wants to make a dent on the rampant poverty in this country.

He said so many nice things, but if I were him, I would first of all isolate dealing with the civil service where malaise, inertia and general sloppiness are the order of the day as a priority number one.

It is not a secret that many civil servants in this country are not committed. It is not a secret that the primary aim some civil servants jump on a plane to attend conferences abroad is not to represent Malawi in any meaningful way like implementing the stuff discussed or learned.

Rather, the primary aim is to claim the lucrative foreign travel allowances that government pays and shop for their wives, husbands, girlfriends and children.

There is nothing wrong with this, except that since they represent Malawi, Malawians must also benefit by way of implementation of the stuff that they gain when they make such foreign travel.

But the President knows better than to be told as he gave an example of some civil servants who shunned meetings in Japan and opted to go shopping for reconditioned vehicles.

My point in all this is this: Mutharika has the right energies and motivation at the moment to change and make a dent, no matter how small it can be, on this country’s problems, but his undoing will be the highly demotivated civil service that needs a real nice whacking if this country is to move forward even for an inch.

The Civil Service Reform Programme being championed by Vice-President Saulos Chilima should not be a mere window-dressing with no meaningful outcomes in the end. It will then be deemed as a waste of time and money just like the countless others in the past.

This country and its people deserve better and there is a flicker of hope when you have a president trying to say and do the right things.

May he continue for the unforeseeable future, but Malawians are watching.