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.