This is a fundamental question. A good question, too, and it needs a good answer. This blog will bring an honest answer that will satisfy some, annoy others. But still an honest answer for Malawi's cultural setting.
Coming out, here, soon.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Dark Wednesday
Malawi was all good news not long ago: a growing economy (the world's second fastest growing after Qatar), peaceful elections in May, 2009.
What else? We had our own problems but we never anticipated anything like the fuel shortage that is with us now. Let alone now when the subsidised fertiliser for this year has been done in time, a couple of months before first rains. We all relaxed.
Then, suddenly, power interuptions became common. Mobile phone networks elusive. Fuel dissappeared. This is Wednesday, 2 December, and the fuel situation is just bad. Vehicles are parked. People have no clue how they will travel tonight. It is all unbelievable. Not long ago, we could buy petrol or diesel any time, any quantity, knowing we would find the gas any other time we want it.
No more. This Wednesday is dark. But as we say, the darkest hour, the nearer the dawn. Let's all hope we will have fuel in the country on Thursday as the Petroleum Importers official has said in the media today.
What else? We had our own problems but we never anticipated anything like the fuel shortage that is with us now. Let alone now when the subsidised fertiliser for this year has been done in time, a couple of months before first rains. We all relaxed.
Then, suddenly, power interuptions became common. Mobile phone networks elusive. Fuel dissappeared. This is Wednesday, 2 December, and the fuel situation is just bad. Vehicles are parked. People have no clue how they will travel tonight. It is all unbelievable. Not long ago, we could buy petrol or diesel any time, any quantity, knowing we would find the gas any other time we want it.
No more. This Wednesday is dark. But as we say, the darkest hour, the nearer the dawn. Let's all hope we will have fuel in the country on Thursday as the Petroleum Importers official has said in the media today.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Law and National Interest
Law is unfair by its nature, Dr Ngeyi Kanyongolo of University of Malawi's Faculty of Law once told me.
Not just unfair. Law is blind to national needs of Malawi. Take the shortage of foreign exchange, for example. We have no forex to import essential commodities. We know some of the economic causes of this forex dry spell. And we know the economic solutions.
One of them is to close forex bureaux that are not doing what economics demands for the growth of our country.
The result was a dilemma of law versus national interest. Even President Dr Bingu wa Mutharika cannot understand law (or lawyers as he said in a recent one hour interview with TVM). Why is law not for national development?
Perhaps this is an unfair questions. Law is for development. This is the reason our government has a Ministry of Justice. It is part of national development. No doubt about that.
The challenge comes in when individuals have to take the whole country into prosperity or poverty with their verdicts as happened last year when the courts reversed government closure of some forex bureaux.
“Last year, I said we should close bureaux to save the money but somebody in the courts said no. They said I am interfering with the Judiciary. I am saying the Judiciary is interfering with me. It does not make sense. It makes me mad. It makes me angry. In future, I will put stringent measures. I don’t care who says what. I am fed up,” said President Dr Bingu wa Mutharika.
Can the Judiciary interfere with something else aprt from its own professional interference (checks and balances)? The Judiciary is assumed the arm of government that does not make mistakes; one that does not need presssure from any sector of the world population.
But law is not the ultimate. Different parts of development work together. Law should respect solutions from outside itself. Law should learn to listen to other disciplines.
Not just unfair. Law is blind to national needs of Malawi. Take the shortage of foreign exchange, for example. We have no forex to import essential commodities. We know some of the economic causes of this forex dry spell. And we know the economic solutions.
One of them is to close forex bureaux that are not doing what economics demands for the growth of our country.
The result was a dilemma of law versus national interest. Even President Dr Bingu wa Mutharika cannot understand law (or lawyers as he said in a recent one hour interview with TVM). Why is law not for national development?
Perhaps this is an unfair questions. Law is for development. This is the reason our government has a Ministry of Justice. It is part of national development. No doubt about that.
The challenge comes in when individuals have to take the whole country into prosperity or poverty with their verdicts as happened last year when the courts reversed government closure of some forex bureaux.
“Last year, I said we should close bureaux to save the money but somebody in the courts said no. They said I am interfering with the Judiciary. I am saying the Judiciary is interfering with me. It does not make sense. It makes me mad. It makes me angry. In future, I will put stringent measures. I don’t care who says what. I am fed up,” said President Dr Bingu wa Mutharika.
Can the Judiciary interfere with something else aprt from its own professional interference (checks and balances)? The Judiciary is assumed the arm of government that does not make mistakes; one that does not need presssure from any sector of the world population.
But law is not the ultimate. Different parts of development work together. Law should respect solutions from outside itself. Law should learn to listen to other disciplines.
Shortage of Everything
These are tough times. Everything—almost everything, indeed--seems to be going into the wrong direction.
Fuel is in acute shortage. Long queues as I have never seen in my life have become daily sight now. People just queue without knowing when fuel would be available. Call it faith—the belief in things unseen.
That is what I did today, sent a driver with a 180 litre prado to a service station where he spent the whole day and returned on an empty tank. No diesel has been delivered. A real crisis.
Power interruptions are order of the day—they are normal, actually. Mobile phone network is unreliable. Some cotton farmers still don’t know what to do with their crop. It has lost value and weight.
Foreign Exchange is not just there; no money to import essential commodities.
Tough times indeed! One wonders what is in second term for Mutharika. His first term in office was tough but a thorough analysis determines that the first term was tougher than this one. The challenges of the first term from 2004 to 2009 were local, and that is dangerous. Your own people are more dangerous than enemies from abroad. The problems now are international (although local to some understanding.)
The internal challenges needed internal solutions and that was tough. But the challenges facing Malawi now have got more to do with regional and international issues and one of them, least thought and which you might reject, is climate change.
What has climate change got to do with our challenges now? The first challenge Mutharika
inherited was food shortage, an acute one. We had erratic rains and hunger was part of life.
As a way forward, Mutharika introduced a subsidised fertilizer programme, hoping rains would come in time. Rains have generally been kind with us. Little did we think that erratic rains have more to do with climate change than anything else. So fertiliser depleted our hard earned forex and here we are without the scarce commodity.
Power interruptions can happen at three stages: at generation (hydro power stations), distribution and reception. Most of our interruptions are from low power generation, resulting into power rationing.
The main problem is with the water body that generates our electricity, the Shire River, which comes from Lake Malawi. (It is also important to know that 80 percent of rivers that feed Lake Malawi are from Mozambique and they are drying because of climate change.)
We have weeds that are a real nuisance to the Shire River. Once rains come and water washes weeds from Liwonde, down to Nkula, generation is hugely disturbed.
A thorough analysis can connect the weeds and unstable water levels to climate change. This is a weird theory, anyway, but climate change is responsible for the fast spread of HIV, the virus that can cause AIDS. It is up to you to read more. I just wanted to make a point.
We are all waiting for President Mutharika to address these issues. In the short term yes. But what about the long term? His conviction in managaing climate change is the answer. If the President can lead Malawi and the region in mitigating climate change, history shall remember him as someone who had a vision for this small yet beautiful country.
Fuel is in acute shortage. Long queues as I have never seen in my life have become daily sight now. People just queue without knowing when fuel would be available. Call it faith—the belief in things unseen.
That is what I did today, sent a driver with a 180 litre prado to a service station where he spent the whole day and returned on an empty tank. No diesel has been delivered. A real crisis.
Power interruptions are order of the day—they are normal, actually. Mobile phone network is unreliable. Some cotton farmers still don’t know what to do with their crop. It has lost value and weight.
Foreign Exchange is not just there; no money to import essential commodities.
Tough times indeed! One wonders what is in second term for Mutharika. His first term in office was tough but a thorough analysis determines that the first term was tougher than this one. The challenges of the first term from 2004 to 2009 were local, and that is dangerous. Your own people are more dangerous than enemies from abroad. The problems now are international (although local to some understanding.)
The internal challenges needed internal solutions and that was tough. But the challenges facing Malawi now have got more to do with regional and international issues and one of them, least thought and which you might reject, is climate change.
What has climate change got to do with our challenges now? The first challenge Mutharika
inherited was food shortage, an acute one. We had erratic rains and hunger was part of life.
As a way forward, Mutharika introduced a subsidised fertilizer programme, hoping rains would come in time. Rains have generally been kind with us. Little did we think that erratic rains have more to do with climate change than anything else. So fertiliser depleted our hard earned forex and here we are without the scarce commodity.
Power interruptions can happen at three stages: at generation (hydro power stations), distribution and reception. Most of our interruptions are from low power generation, resulting into power rationing.
The main problem is with the water body that generates our electricity, the Shire River, which comes from Lake Malawi. (It is also important to know that 80 percent of rivers that feed Lake Malawi are from Mozambique and they are drying because of climate change.)
We have weeds that are a real nuisance to the Shire River. Once rains come and water washes weeds from Liwonde, down to Nkula, generation is hugely disturbed.
A thorough analysis can connect the weeds and unstable water levels to climate change. This is a weird theory, anyway, but climate change is responsible for the fast spread of HIV, the virus that can cause AIDS. It is up to you to read more. I just wanted to make a point.
We are all waiting for President Mutharika to address these issues. In the short term yes. But what about the long term? His conviction in managaing climate change is the answer. If the President can lead Malawi and the region in mitigating climate change, history shall remember him as someone who had a vision for this small yet beautiful country.
Monday, October 26, 2009
My Love
Tony Mita, the unsung journalism hero who rose to become Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Information, used to call me “my friend, Mzati” until months ago when everything changed, just like that—just like that indeed.
Now, he calls me bambo whose English equivalent is son, kind of, son as in son-in-law. This is the story.
Tony and his wife, Nalyss, have three grown up children: Cheulekene, my former colleague at Nation Publications Limited where she is Section Head of Nation on Sunday newspaper; Tendai, studying in the US, is the only son.
But this story is not about these two, no; it is about Khama, the last born of Tony and Nalyss. It is not about Khama only; it is also about me, the last born of Willians and Anne Nkolokosa.
I met Khama on a Saturday afternoon when she joined Cheu to NPL newsroom to babysit Matamando, Cheu’s firstborn son. I did not work on Saturdays and I do not really remember why I stopped by the office. Neither do I remember where I was driving to when I passed by my former office which I left on March 30, 2009, to join TVM on April 1, the day TVM was launched in 1999.
But I do remember that I got something on my desk. That was long time ago.
Not long ago, in April this year, I called Khama and we started what ended up into a love affair in July this year, just after my return from Egypt where I accompanied HE Dr Bingu wa Mutharika.
By the time I was going to Germany, two and a half weeks after returning from Egypt, she travelled from Lilongwe to see me off at the airport in Blantyre, letting me fly away, allowing distance to carry me away from her.
Khama is the lady I called my love in the entries I did while in Germany. Now you know her. My love is Khama Mita, an MPH candidate at the University of Malawi’s College of Medicine in Blantyre where she also works.
For years, Tony Mita called me friend. One August Saturday evening I walked into his house with Khama. He greeted me without the title “my friend”. Next time he called me bambo and he has called me so ever since.
Life can be beautiful.
Now, he calls me bambo whose English equivalent is son, kind of, son as in son-in-law. This is the story.
Tony and his wife, Nalyss, have three grown up children: Cheulekene, my former colleague at Nation Publications Limited where she is Section Head of Nation on Sunday newspaper; Tendai, studying in the US, is the only son.
But this story is not about these two, no; it is about Khama, the last born of Tony and Nalyss. It is not about Khama only; it is also about me, the last born of Willians and Anne Nkolokosa.
I met Khama on a Saturday afternoon when she joined Cheu to NPL newsroom to babysit Matamando, Cheu’s firstborn son. I did not work on Saturdays and I do not really remember why I stopped by the office. Neither do I remember where I was driving to when I passed by my former office which I left on March 30, 2009, to join TVM on April 1, the day TVM was launched in 1999.
But I do remember that I got something on my desk. That was long time ago.
Not long ago, in April this year, I called Khama and we started what ended up into a love affair in July this year, just after my return from Egypt where I accompanied HE Dr Bingu wa Mutharika.
By the time I was going to Germany, two and a half weeks after returning from Egypt, she travelled from Lilongwe to see me off at the airport in Blantyre, letting me fly away, allowing distance to carry me away from her.
Khama is the lady I called my love in the entries I did while in Germany. Now you know her. My love is Khama Mita, an MPH candidate at the University of Malawi’s College of Medicine in Blantyre where she also works.
For years, Tony Mita called me friend. One August Saturday evening I walked into his house with Khama. He greeted me without the title “my friend”. Next time he called me bambo and he has called me so ever since.
Life can be beautiful.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Conflict of Emotions, Thursday, September 10, 2009
All these days I wanted to go back home. Now, it feels bad to leave Germany.
Am I alright? Didn't I long for home? Didn't I long for my daughter and my love? What is happening to me? I have just been asking myself these questions. They are valid questions. Things we leave behind do not only cause happiness. They cause sorrow as well, even if it might be temporary sadness.
Why do good things come to an end? That same question by Nelly Furtado. Put rightly, Why do all things come to an end?
I was used to Charles, a Project Manager (Africa) at DW Academy. He is a wonderful, wise man. Carla was a lecturer who exercised our minds. Christiane was a wonderful help throughout our stay here. She was our guide and proved useful, partly because she studied a lot of history and art in college, partly because she has a good command of the English language.
Alexanderia was a hardworker, making sure our stay was comfortable. She carries a listening ear, too. Pamela was just wonderful. We were beginning to like each other, to understand that humanity is one (never mind skin colour).
Just as this sense of one global identity was sinking deep into us, enabling me to survive the weeks I have been away from home, here I am about to board an aeroplane to leave for Malawi.
It feels bad. The closing today was emotional. And very helpful. To be honest, this has been a powerful course, a take off for me into a management flight. The 11 participants shared information and we were becoming one big family from Africa.
Just at that time when we were getting on with each other, just when we were accepting that we are away from home, just then, time to go back home came.
I am happy to go back home, to my country. No doubt about that, but I am also sad that I am leaving Germany, a place that has been my home away from home for four weeks. Germany: Thank you for your kindness. I am going back home to my beloved country. But Germany know this: You shall remain in my heart, almost always.
Good bye.
Am I alright? Didn't I long for home? Didn't I long for my daughter and my love? What is happening to me? I have just been asking myself these questions. They are valid questions. Things we leave behind do not only cause happiness. They cause sorrow as well, even if it might be temporary sadness.
Why do good things come to an end? That same question by Nelly Furtado. Put rightly, Why do all things come to an end?
I was used to Charles, a Project Manager (Africa) at DW Academy. He is a wonderful, wise man. Carla was a lecturer who exercised our minds. Christiane was a wonderful help throughout our stay here. She was our guide and proved useful, partly because she studied a lot of history and art in college, partly because she has a good command of the English language.
Alexanderia was a hardworker, making sure our stay was comfortable. She carries a listening ear, too. Pamela was just wonderful. We were beginning to like each other, to understand that humanity is one (never mind skin colour).
Just as this sense of one global identity was sinking deep into us, enabling me to survive the weeks I have been away from home, here I am about to board an aeroplane to leave for Malawi.
It feels bad. The closing today was emotional. And very helpful. To be honest, this has been a powerful course, a take off for me into a management flight. The 11 participants shared information and we were becoming one big family from Africa.
Just at that time when we were getting on with each other, just when we were accepting that we are away from home, just then, time to go back home came.
I am happy to go back home, to my country. No doubt about that, but I am also sad that I am leaving Germany, a place that has been my home away from home for four weeks. Germany: Thank you for your kindness. I am going back home to my beloved country. But Germany know this: You shall remain in my heart, almost always.
Good bye.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Things We Leave behind, Sunday, September 6, 2009
So, here I am. Sunday, September 6, 2009. Still counting down; no, counting days now. I am looking forward to the day I shall fly out of Germany.
No. I think the day I shall fly out of Germany is looking (staring is the right word I think) at me. And it feels bad, you know. Here I am. I have been longing for this day, haven't I? I was here bothering you that I was missing home.
Now it scares me to think of leaving Germany, a place that has been my home away from home for the past three weeks and this week, making it four weeks.
What is this we fear in things we leave behind? When I was flying out of Chileka, I was sad to leave Malawi behind me. And you know what Malawi means: the roads, the hills, the smiles, the markets, and everything else but first and above all, the people, and the loved one.
Now I don't know what is it that should make me feel sorry to leave Germany. Iguess it is human nature to feel sorry on parting with anything. Parting, as I am realising, can be a moment of two faces: one of happiness, another of sadness.
It is just human nature. Happiness because, in my case, I am going back home to see my country, my people, my life; sadness because, in my case too, I am leaving what was becoming part of me: the bed I have slept on for 19 days here in Berlin and eight days in other cities, the corridors I walked, the chair I sat on when working on my laptop, the meals I had, the friends from Africa I met, the friends from church who hugged me yesterday.
We spoke different languages but we got our comfort from serving one God, a God who does not respect skin colour, a God who has endowed us with wisdom to survive in this world.
And then the thought comes: As I am missing home, are people also missing me? Am I a source of happiness in my house? Or those who live with me are happy that I am away? Am I a good manager at work? Or colleagues in my department are happy that their head is away? Are they looking forward to the day I shall be back in the office?
Just thoughts.
It is hard to imagine the sorrow that we carry from things we leave behind. Yet some places cause less sorrow than others. I will feel sorry from leaving Germany, just for a moment. But the joy of going home is far greater than the sorry feeling of leaving Germany.
So I choose home. I choose Malawi, my home, my country.
No. I think the day I shall fly out of Germany is looking (staring is the right word I think) at me. And it feels bad, you know. Here I am. I have been longing for this day, haven't I? I was here bothering you that I was missing home.
Now it scares me to think of leaving Germany, a place that has been my home away from home for the past three weeks and this week, making it four weeks.
What is this we fear in things we leave behind? When I was flying out of Chileka, I was sad to leave Malawi behind me. And you know what Malawi means: the roads, the hills, the smiles, the markets, and everything else but first and above all, the people, and the loved one.
Now I don't know what is it that should make me feel sorry to leave Germany. Iguess it is human nature to feel sorry on parting with anything. Parting, as I am realising, can be a moment of two faces: one of happiness, another of sadness.
It is just human nature. Happiness because, in my case, I am going back home to see my country, my people, my life; sadness because, in my case too, I am leaving what was becoming part of me: the bed I have slept on for 19 days here in Berlin and eight days in other cities, the corridors I walked, the chair I sat on when working on my laptop, the meals I had, the friends from Africa I met, the friends from church who hugged me yesterday.
We spoke different languages but we got our comfort from serving one God, a God who does not respect skin colour, a God who has endowed us with wisdom to survive in this world.
And then the thought comes: As I am missing home, are people also missing me? Am I a source of happiness in my house? Or those who live with me are happy that I am away? Am I a good manager at work? Or colleagues in my department are happy that their head is away? Are they looking forward to the day I shall be back in the office?
Just thoughts.
It is hard to imagine the sorrow that we carry from things we leave behind. Yet some places cause less sorrow than others. I will feel sorry from leaving Germany, just for a moment. But the joy of going home is far greater than the sorry feeling of leaving Germany.
So I choose home. I choose Malawi, my home, my country.
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