Happy Independence Day

Happy Independence Day to all my fellow Malawians. This day gives us the opportunity to reflect on the gains and strides we have achieved as a nation. It is that time that we celebrate the joys of having a constitutional government, however, we need to be vigilant and be on guard against politicians that purpot themselves as constitutional advocates when infact they are trying to consolidate their power. In political world, we need to take note of this important fact, political parties and their leaders will avail themselves like angels, trying to sell their 'good' manifestos, however, in politics parties will always have multi-dimensional goals and the two broad ones are public and private goals. You and me are very important to the achievement of both public and private goals of parties. Access to power constitutes a major private goal for political parties while those goals that parties 'front' and claim to pursue are called public goals. Etzioni (1960:260,261) explains that ‘public goals improve the input-output balance by recruiting support (inputs) to the organization from groups which would not support the private goals’. This is consistent with Selznick’s (1952:82, 83, 84) analysis of the goals of the Communist party. He shows that while the private goal is to gain power and control, there are various layers of public goals presented to the rank and file, sympathizers, and the masses. They in turn make us dedicated 'blind' followers who are robbed of our own intrisic power in day light. My fellow Malawians, this is our country, it is our duty to safeguard it. History will judge us by the quality of what we will pass on to the next generation.

The 2012- 2013 Budget

The 2012-2013 National Budget may have been passed but the big question remains, what is in it for the poor? Firstly, Malawi like most countries, identification of poor people will lead us to rural areas. It is a common perception that the outskirts of consumption centres are the hubs of poverty. It is important however that when looking at policy issues like national budgets, there is need to pay particular attention to those forgotten utra poor citizens living in towns and cities of our country. As compared to their rural counterparts, fellow citizens in the cities will be described as utra poor because often, they have no jobs, no land to farm and do not have capital to start businesses or property to use as collateral for bank loans. Thus they are hardest hit by poverty. The national budgets in the recent years have tended to support families with Farm Inputs Subsidies (FIS)which unfortunately mostly target the rural poor families. The imapct of this deliberate attempt to blow out poverty in rural masses through food security has be quite enomous, on the other hand, it has as well provided a premise for political contestation, with ruling elite controlling major part of implementation process. This strategy however, has often not paid attention to the landless poor city and town dwellers- it may have been assumed that the benefit of the programme would trickle down to this sector of the society, but does it happen? Some strategies like Public Works Programmes (PWP)work well to absorb the poor. Jobless citizens, especially women and the youth are involved in community development projects like building of roads and bridges and in turn are paid some stipend per the work done. The programme has tended to target rural communities. The two strategies have been touted in the budget as already the main focus to deal with some of the challenges of joblessness and poverty. However, the question is what is in the budget for the utra poor of this society? Do we need to start looking at long term startegies to bolster our industrial capacity as a nation to increase job creation? How about our infrastructure, do we not need to start reflecting on infrastractural development in our cities as a deliberate strategy to improve the employment sector that would greatly absorb the majority of utra poor citizenry? My view of our nation is that we have not yet mastered the art of strategic orientation,we need a systemic overhaul that will include dismatling of the human tragedy that is in our planners and as well as our infrastructure that are being outdated by time.Lest we get archived while still 'functional'.