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Is aid the only solution to our poverty — for 40 years, it is clear, we haven’t performed well economically? How long will you keep helping us?
This is the question I put to Norwegian Minister of International Development Hilde Johnson recently.
“Aid is just one partial answer and far from sufficient,” she said. That, I thought, was an honest answer. “We cannot develop Malawi. Malawi can be developed by Malawians,” she added.
After all, Norway, whose majority of four and a half million people are middle class, developed without aid.
Norway is the world’s third largest exporter of oil and, therefore, should be swimming in money. True. But Sudan and Nigeria, too, are oil producers. Are these countries rich? No.
Malawi and Norway share a few important historical similarities. Both countries were once colonised. Both were once poor. In fact, we are still among the world’s poorest. But it’s important to know that Norway was the poorest European country a little over 100 years ago. But today the country is one of the world’s richest and a donor to Malawi.
The majority in Norway are middle class, a direct contrast to Malawi where most people spend less than K100 a day, in some cases a lot more than that amount.
Both Malawi and Norway had beliefs in funny myths. Norway may have been worse at this as I saw at Norsk Folkemuseum outside the capital, Oslo. Norwegians believed in spirits and had all sorts of laughable means of protecting themselves from disease and bad omen.
We, too, had our own funny traditions, some of which we still cling to up to date like kuchotsa fumbi.
Norway suffered invasion by Germany. We suffered slave trade and colonialism. At a time we were living happily, believing in Chisumphi, exchanging goods for goods, practising democracy under trees, Arabs came and disturbed the status quo.
Strong men were forced into slavery leaving the weak who could not develop the country. There was no peace at all for people to live happily. Malawians were among Africans who developed South America and other countries that got slaves.
Hundreds of years later, some whites came preaching the gospel and an end to slave trade. This was good news but soon another group of whites came talking about a kingdom that wanted to administer our country.
It was from slave trade to colonialism. History records several reasons for the scramble of Africa but the main one being economical interest. In countries like Zimbabwe whose resources outweigh Malawi’s, white masters settled in large numbers.
Malawians suffered thangata at the hands of white masters. Artefacts were taken to Europe which might now be generating money for their museums.
All that aside we now have political independence attained in 1964 but economic freedom is yet to come. Malawi does not generate money enough for its national budget. We need foreign support. We have had such assistance for years yet we are becoming poorer and poorer.
Aid is like a salary. An employer pays a salary that makes a worker long for another, another and another until, finally, the employee works for 30 years without building a house. The best is for an employee to find means of generating income to supplement the monthly salary.
Aid which comes in two forms — grants and loans — makes a country even more dependent. So, like in our case, it’s been aid, aid and more aid up to 40 years of independence without much to show.
What has gone wrong? There are two schools of thought. One blames the donors, the other bad governance.
Aid, say some scholars, is not for free and therefore not aid at all. Donors bring money with conditions which, sometimes, aren’t good at all. Privatisation is a typical example. Loans have to be paid back with huge interests.
But the main reason for our poverty should be bad governance. Our leaders, especially in the last 10 years, didn’t have a vision for Malawi.
Malawi has natural resources in the form of water and land. A fresh body of water runs from Karonga through Mangochi in the name of Lake Malawi to Nsanje in form of Shire River. Further, the country is blessed with small lakes and rivers that can supply water for irrigation.
Our climate can allow cultivation almost throughout the year. We have vast pieces of land to grow crops and raise animals. Have we used these to optimum productivity? No.
I visited Utviklingsfondet, an agricultural NGO, and learned that Norwergians enjoy Mzuzu Coffee which, unfortunately found its way to Norway in negligible amounts. The NGO is working in 15 countries, including Malawi.
“We import vegetables from South Africa and South America,” said project coordinator, Frederik Frederiksen asking: “Why can’t we import from Malawi if you had the products?”
Indeed. But do we produce vegetables that we can export? No. We grow vegetables for street-side markets.
So, the truth is that markets are there. But we can’t penetrate them because we have nothing to offer. This is shame because we have land and water and reasonable rainfall, double that of East Anglia, a small area that supplies food to Britain.
“It’s a question of management,” said British High Commissioner to Malawi, Norman Ling. Of course, because we have a whole faculty of irrigation engineering at Bunda College of Agriculture and a working department of civil engineering at Polytechnic. And we have admirable irrigation at Nchalo, for example, where people lose words at the way sugarcane is grown.
If only we had another area like Nchalo growing maize we couldn’t be talking of food shortage! By the way what has happened to our agricultural schemes, Mulanje Canning Factory, our cotton ginners and ... the list could be endless?
Government is, perhaps, the main culprit. Remember 20 years ago how prisoners used to cut trees, indigenous trees all over Malawi? Tsanya in Mwima, Balaka, was robbed of the name because the trees, after which the place was named, were cut by inmates.
Primary schools, too, have contributed to the problem. Some schools asked pupils to bring trees daily for a whole month. I remember well at my primary school June was a month for trees and grass. Two weeks we were taking grass and another two weeks for trees. Imagine two weeks of trees! Everyone of the 500 pupils from Standard 3 to 8 carrying one tree per day, 10 in two weeks. This came to 5,000 trees in two weeks.
And these were trees cut from the catchment area of Shire River. Are we surprised today that we have silt disturbing the levels of water in our beautiful river, thus, affecting power generation which in turn makes industries lose millions of kwacha sometimes?
It is clear. Our underdevelopment is not necessarily due to aid but bad governance. It’s our fault. Look at how much public funds go into private pockets. But how long will countries like Norway help us? That is the question the Minister eschewed.
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