Of Malawi leader's public lecture, arrogance and empty gimmicks

THE TWISTER

BY BRIAN LIGOMEKA

The political pot is boiling. The civil society organisations are planning to hold demonstrations to protest against poor governance and economic woes dogging the country. Poor economic management, the obvious putrid fruits of decayed fiscal and monetary policies are manifesting themselves through fuel shortages, forex scarcity, high unemployment and poverty.

The once over-hyped moniker of our leader as an economic engineer, which we were persuaded to accept as true during yesteryears has turned to be a political falsehood.

I was on a fuel queue with my son this other day and he turned to me and asked: “I thought people were alleging that Atcheya was uneducated and his handling of economic issues was shambolic, why is it that during his ten-year reign, Malawi never experienced fuel and forex shortages as is the case now when our country is being led by a professor and an economics PhD holder?”

Honestly speaking I had no answer. All I did was to hit back at him with suggestions: “Go and ask your lecturer if education can remove political arrogance, myopia and egocentrism. Find out from your lecturer what happens when you are very advanced in age in terms of your reasoning capacity and your attitude towards others. Ask your lecturer about the age at which one starts showing signs of being senile?” Then you will have an answer.

If you don’t find an answer from your lecturers, then read an investigative audit and management report of the special committee of eminent persons on the operations of Comesa part of which declares:

 “The relations between Comesa and its institutions, and Member States are restrained because of the demeanour and arrogance of the Secretary General. He has created more misunderstanding and hatred in the institution and member States than he has made friends.”

The report laments in part that its Secretary General did not fully utilise his directors for decision making as a team as he was fond of summoning them either “to lecture to them, rebuke or impose his will on them”.

 “The net effect has been to reduce his directors to implementers of his directives which by and large breach the existing legal instruments. Indeed, he uses them to rubber-stamp his decisions,” reads the Comesa report in part that ended in that Secretary General being fired.

I told my son that if he reads that Comesa Report he would understand why Malawi is embroiled in political and economic quagmire; and why this country is at risk of degenerating into a dynasty.

I made those suggestions to my son because I did not want to tell him that while high education makes some become better citizens, the same high education turn others into crazy, arrogant, egoistic and nepotistic individuals.

The point is that Atcheya had his own basketfuls of political and economic goofs including the third term psychosis, but the performance of the current regime leaves a lot to be desired. Malawians are now bearing the brunt of the dictatorial, disastrous and tactless leadership whose consequences are the fuel queues, enactment of idiotic laws, the freezing of donor aid and many other idiosyncratic gaffes. Just imagine at the peak of the current diplomatic gaffes, fuel and forex shortages, someone believes that the best solution he can offer to Malawians is to stage a public lecture which has already been snubbed by the opposition and the civil society as cataclysmic and contemptible.

The current crises do not need political gimmicks in form of public lectures, neither do they need public lies as answers. They need real solutions and not empty talk and arrogant excuses sandwiched with distorted Pan Africanism philosophy and political sovereignty postulations that ignore the fundamental benefits and costs of globalisation and good governance.