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Evaluating unemployment in Malawi
By
Allan Matthews Semba & Peter Muwanya - 12-06-2002 |
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An unemployed person is “perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under the sun”. This is how Thomas Carlyle looks at the whole problem of the unemployed who, in normal circumstances, ought to have secured jobs. But are we really justified to blame fortune for the problem of unemployment that many Malawians for instance have? We think not.
Reckoning the fact that Malawi, like many other southern African countries, is poor, the problem of unemployment only manages to add salt to the wound by making our country poorer. While on one hand unemployment brings poverty, poverty on the other hand breeds and aggravates unemployment. It is all like a vicious circle.
With the introduction of the free primary school education in our country, there are many secondary as well as post-secondary school graduates. However, many of them hardly find jobs. This is either because there are no jobs at all, or for the few vacancies that exist, there are often deterring conditions like work experience and age limit.
From a different perspective, self-employment does not seem a viable alternative for such graduates either. This is often due to poverty. One does not expect a recently graduated student to have enough funds overnight, which can enable them to start any serious business. The problem is worsened when we take into consideration the fact that many of such students finish school on scholarship basis. They are then expected to pay back that money once they have secured jobs.
However, we cannot load it all on poverty. Our own mentality on the whole notion of education and what it means to get employed, is deficient. The fact that many students are told that they have to get employed by somebody else when they finish school, leaves no room for thought about self-employment. As a result, no pupil thinks of finishing school with the thought of beginning a business— to employ themselves as well as others. Yet this way of thinking remains the status-quo for many Malawians. But this is myopic thinking which does not pave way for development.
However, we should admit that the problem of unemployment is indeed a complex one. Though we realise that it can really be a consequence of a deficient education system as seen above, there are also many other factors to its effect. This is so because it also has to do with the economic, sociological as well as the moral aspects of a human person. Let us look at what all this implies.
Economics is defined as the human activity whereby society makes a living through the production, distribution and use of wealth. Usually when the economy is poor, production and distribution of wealth will likewise become poor. Yet production and distribution are related to employment. The more the production, the more labour is required.
Therefore, production and distribution determine employment. From this understanding, we can rightly conclude that the problem of unemployment in Malawi has some of its roots in our unhealthy economic system. Though we recognise that there are some factors that affect our economic system from without, for instance, international trade policies, there are also other factors from outside. Improper use of funds, lack of transparency and accountability, are some of the internal factors that can influence our economic standing.
If Malawi as a country cannot administer its funds appropriately, you do not expect our economy to be good. Take for instance cases where we are sometimes given some donor funding for any particular development project. The money that is meant for such projects is sometimes misappropriated and ends up benefiting those that are not necessarily supposed to be the beneficiaries of such funds. This is mostly evidenced by the many stories which one reads in the papers, hears on the radio, or even sees on the television in which even some big officials are named to have misappropriated funds in their respective places of work.
Yet this is not the only abuse that leads to economic disasters and consequently the problem of employment. Nepotism, if looked at from a certain perspective can act as another cause of unemployment. If wrong people are employed for jobs that they are unqualified for, simply because they are related to the top most bosses of those employing bodies, production will in the long run suffer. And if production suffers, the economy suffers with it. In the meantime, able and qualified people are left without jobs or simply end up taking jobs that do not tally with their specialised fields, hence making them unable to develop their potentials.
Unfortunately this seems to be the epidemic in our country these days. Many people get employed not out of merit but rather through how well-connected to influential people they are. In the long run, many are left frustrated to the extent that for those still at school, hard work is no more viewed as an ideal to be pursued to get a better job in the future. And this also explains why cheating during examination is commonplace in our schools. It is indeed a vicious circle that if not checked will only manage to make things change from bad to worse and never the other way round. |
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