Blantyre - Jan 20, 2012
The barbaric lawlessness which broke out in some parts of Lilongwe through the heartless stripping of women by some hoodlums has astonished me. It is only in a lawless and stateless nation like Somalia where such foolish and horrendous incidents can occur and even the sensible Somalis do not do it. I am wondering as to how such criminal and nefarious acts can occur in a nation like ours where our president boasts at podium that the police service has the best Inspector General in the name of Peter Mukhito.
The horrible part of the infamous gender violence are allegations that some civilian and uniformed police officers witnessed the incidents and never intervened timely as expected of patriotic law enforcers who are mentored and inspired by the best IG the country has ever had.
Following this incident, I question Mutharika’s rationale for boasting on the podium that Mukhito is the best policeman and inspector general the country has ever had. I have serious reservations with Mukhito’s so-called outstanding performance which Mutharika praises when others think otherwise for a number of reasons. Mukhito and his officers have to date miserably failed to trace and arrest machete-wielding youths who like terrorists used DPP vehicles on July 19 ahead of July 20 peaceful civilian protests to intimidate the citizenry as they criss-crossed the streets of Blantyre.
Another incident that baffles me is the news that Mukhito was meeting the Polytechnic slain student late Robert Chasowa. Up to date, Mukhito and his commissioners have not briefed the nation what his Criminal Investigations Department found in relation to the death of the deceased student.
That’s not the end of the story on my serious reservations with the so-called finest Inspector General of Police. The latest study by Transparency International has just revealed that Mukhito heads the most corrupt institution in the country. I am not sure whether one can take credit for that.
I still doubt how he can best be described as the finest police officer in the land when under his tenure as police boss, his officers miserably failed to control protesting vendors in the capital city of the land where even the police headquarters itself is located. Thanks to our patriotic members of the Malawi Defence Force who actually intervened and restored order of the city.
Surely, should the president be calling Mukhito the finest police chief when during his tenure women are being stripped in the streets in broad-daylight? I have my reservations.
How I wish the IG had a system of gathering intelligence within the police service! I am thinking this aloud because if he had that system, he would have discovered that most of his juniors are so bitter with him for forcing them to return the allowance they received after working tirelessly during the July 20 and 21 demonstrations. The Twister has just heard from the rumour mill that the police are so highly demotivated because of the order that those who pocketed the ‘July 20’ fat allowances should return them on a willy-nilly basis. I am not surprised by their sloppy response of the demotivated police officers.
My advice to Mukhito: Let him ask those in administration department on how to do soul searching within the service using the basic but important three analytical tools of PESTLE, SWOT and GAP. After those analyses and implementation of how to turn weaknesses into strengths and threats into opportunities and filling the gaps, I will salute him as our finest IG.
Debts our children will pay
Despite their fine credentials, I don’t admire former Finance Minister Ken Kandodo and his successor Ken Lipenga because I know they have to defend government policy even if they are not comfortable with it. Actually, when being inaugurated as cabinet ministers, they take oath of allegiance by pledging their support and loyalty to the incumbent president and our motherland.
I don’t admire Ken because his position as finance minister demands him to defend the zero-deficit budget regardless of all its well-known flops and repercussions.
When the budget had just been passed I had no kind words for Ken because I shared the view of the other critics that the zero deficit budget would end up as a failed experiment.
I recall one economist rubbished my argument on my fears on domestic borrowing charging it is an important part of fiscal policy and management of aggregate demand in any economy. His argument was that in any economy even in developed nations, when the government is running a budget deficit, it has to borrow money through the issue of debt instruments such as Treasury Bills and long-term government bonds. Such borrowing in his opinion is okay because the emergence of a rising budget deficit due to a weakening economy on one hand means government spending on priority areas such as health, education, transport and agriculture on the other hand.
I argued and still maintain my stand that local borrowing defeats the concept of zero-based budget because it is crowding out the private sector through high taxes, inflation and forex shortages. In that scenario, the description that the budget is pro-development and pro-poor is a fallacy.
On the punitive taxes, my argument has remained that our economy is at the stage where the resource base is so narrow hence overtaxing institutions and people is counterproductive. The same simple argument remains, thus if you want to milk the cow, you need to feed it. In this case, the government is heavily taxing people and businesses which are the source of growth forcing some of them to retrench and even close down. The question is: How do you expect growth from a thin animal, which is being over-milked through punitive taxes?
I now weep for our economy because the harsh reality of our goofs has caught up with us. Despite the huge taxes the revenue authority is milking from us and various institutions, government is slipping into deficits, which it is attempting to tame by resorting to borrowing both domestically and internationally. The consequence of heavy domestic borrowing is the crowding out of private sector in the debt capital market in short and medium term while in the long run, domestic borrowing would translate to even higher taxes as government will be hunting for money to repay that huge accumulated debt.
While Malawi was a beneficiary of debt cancellation few years ago, we have started accumulating debt. While locally, government issued K30 billion worthy of bonds in the market, the country has secured a US$200 million debt from international lenders. If you think, thus the only money our children and their children will repay, you are mistaken because, there is also over US$800 million debt which the country had at the end of last year. If you ask me, I still have doubts if the US$200 million new foreign debt will steady the economy when every month this country is required to spend US$30 million on fuel alone; and this entails depleting almost half of that debt on fuel in three months.
What this means is that our economic woes are far from over and our craving for premature economic independence through experiments such as zero deficit budget will result in the suffering of Malawians.
I know government has problems with some of the prescriptions from IMF, but at the stage we are, we need support from many partners. One of the issues we collided with IMF was on the issue of the value of the Kwacha. President Bingu wa Mutharika has been arguing that if Kwacha is devalued the prices of goods and services will go up. But have prices of goods and services failed to go up because an overvalued Kwacha. Check the table on how prices of goods have defied Mutharika’s assumptions.
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