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Our suffering is self-inflicted
In Malawi we have a serious problem. Not the HIV/Aids pandemic. The problem is that we skirt round issues. The economic mess we are in, for example, is our own making. It is self-inflicted.
Once in the mess, we pretend to be victims of other people's actions. With regard to the economy, our scapegoat are donors. Of course, one thing we are good at is mourning and bemoaning the consequences of our suicidal actions and looking for scapegoats.
More often than not we know how we can get out of our predicaments. In other words, we do not have to re-invent the wheel, as it were. It's all sheer hypocrisy!
This week, we heard Minister of Finance Friday Jumbe and his counterpart in Economic Planning and Development Bingu Mutharika bemoaning the dire straits the country is likely to be plunged in should donors not resume aid to the country (if government fails to fulfil the things it has promised to do in the famous MPRSP).
One of our biggest problems is that we have graduated into big spenders before becoming money spinners. We have a small manufacturing sector or private sector which government chokes and crowds out with heavy borrowing from the banks. The result is prohibitive interest rates.
Imagine a domestic debt of a whopping K45 billion. Can the private sector grow with such borrowing? But government still has to collect tax to run. In the end, it is left with no alternative but to milk the same thin cow that cannot even support itself. A vicious circle. A sorry state indeed.
And then how does government use the money it borrows or revenue it collects? Of course, there is no denying that some of it is used to repay maturing debt. But this is where the problem is.
In the MPRSP we have promised donors to spend on pro-poor programmes. These include education, health and any programme that supports the poor. Now can anyone tell me how keeping a bloated cabinet like ours, fits into the pro-poor programme? Does a cabinet of 46 for a small economy like ours mean good for the country? Whose poverty are we trying to alleviate? Surely we are not helping the masses.
That is not all.
We create dubious institutions which have no benefit to the masses. Take, for example, the National Intelligence Bureau whose activities nobody, except those who created it, appreciates. No one can tell me we need another security organ in Malawi after the Malawi Police Service and the Malawi Armed Forces. What for? And who knows what NIB is doing?
I thought we abolished the notorious Malawi Young Pioneers because it was serving the ruling party at the expense of the state. That is what NIB was created for. It seems to me to be an incarnation of the MYP, and actually with very little or no attempt at all to disguise it. In a multiparty democracy there is no room for secretive institutions. No one knows how staff in this organisation are recruited and to whom the body is accountable.
This institution was allocated hundreds of millions of kwacha. But for what? Spying on the opposition or those deemed or perceived to be unsympathetic to the ruling party? No, please save us from this malady!
So we spend and spend, perhaps very much like in observance of the biblical assurance that we should not bother about what we are going to eat tomorrow for God takes care even of birds of the air which do not sow. Tomorrow will take care of itself!
The biggest tragedy this year is that government made the 2003/2004 budget on a hypothetical premise. This is the thinking that donors will sooner than later start releasing the much-needed money. Wishful thinking. Politicians usually find it so easy to evade hypothetical questions from journalists. They will usually say 'let's cross the bridge when we come to it'.
But when it comes to issues like money they seem to have no problem spending before they get the money. Mind you these are funds that donors have withheld for the third year running now. It just shows government has not been really serious to address the concerns of donors, and hence the withholding of aid.
The danger now is that government will spend this money and then discover that the funds it is so optimistic to get are not coming after all. Result, government will be forced to borrow locally from the same heavily borrowed banks thereby further choking out the private sector.
So, you see what I mean when I say our problems self-made?
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