Prayers for rain not necessary, but action

Four or five days after New Year’s Day, an e-mail was forwarded to me in which the author stated that he was not going to participate in the national prayers for rains on January 9. The reason he gave for his staying away was that Malawi did not need prayer at this stage, but action. Specifically, he mentioned that what was needed was action by way of irrigation.

Not many people would have the courage to stay away from a prayer session. To do so would be to attract intense criticism, nay naked wrath, from people that would regard such a decision as one orchestrated by Lucifer himself.

Agreed, it is absolutely important to bring issues that vex us to the omnipotent, omniscient creator, our God. However, what we often miss is that God expects action from His people. When the Israelites left Egypt and were trapped between the Red Sea and Pharaoh’s army in pursuit, they murmured and grumbled and cursed. God told Moses: “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on (Exodus 14: 15).” It was not time to cry before God in prayer, but time for action.

Malawi needs action. If we cry out to God, we must do so to ask Him to show us how we can move into action. Action to plant and replant trees; action to harvest rain-water; action to desist from wantonly cutting down trees; action to desist from farming or settling in marginal lands; action to engage in irrigation. Plenty of action is what is needed.

It is the height of rudeness, in my view, to damage our environment by doing what we are doing, then turn to God to put things right so that we are shielded from the effects of the environmental degradation we have caused. Malawians are playing nangaunogze (destroy, then put right again) with God, that is simply not fair.

Or perhaps we do not believe that by removing the tree cover from our lands we cause water to run off quickly, carrying with it tonnes of soil and leaving our environment without adequate moisture. As a result, the rainmaking cycle is heavily compromised.

You do not have to raze down an entire forest alone. The few trees you cut without replacing are all that is needed to cause deforestation because somebody else will cut a few more and yet another a few more still. Before you realise it, there will be no forest left.

It takes your action and mine to stop this vicious cycle of destruction. Leave God to deal with situations whose causes have nothing to do with human beings. But to knowingly and willfully cause destruction then begin to call upon God to put things right is being disrespectful.

It is also misdiagnosing the cause of the problem. In Malawi, we are experts at misdiagnosis and we end up taking approaches that do very little to treat the real cause of the problem. A case in point is the wrath directed at Escom management for the frequent blackouts. While it is true that management may be slack in one area or another and thereby contribute to the problem, the greatest cause is the general public. Over the past decade or so, top management at Escom has changed five or six times and yet the problems appear to be worsening. Are they all failures? I do not think so. There was a sharp debate three or four years ago over whether economists would run Escom better than engineers.

The truth of the matter is that we can bring in people from another planet to run Escom but as long as the environment is in the state in which it currently is, that intervention will not amount to much. The silting up, the weed growth, the dwindling water levels, among other environmental problems, will vex economists or aliens as much as they do engineers. Our country needs healing, literally. We need to search within our communities and see what we can do to reverse the serious environmental degradation that this country acutely suffers from.

The bottom line is that we need to take action and take it now to normalize our rainmaking cycles and avert perennial droughts. If we chose not to take the appropriate action, the last person to leave this country should please remember to switch off the lights. n