Everything Rises and Falls on Leadership

Everything rises and falls on leadership...that is according to John C. Maxwell bestselling author and speaker on leadership...and I agree fully with his statement...

After church yesterday, I went for lunch at the Pastor's house where he was basically welcoming new people to the church and used it as an opportunity to know more about us...during my time there, I discovered that his wife had been to Malawi in the early 90s and as we talked, she asked about the economic/development status of Malawi... she remembered it as being one of the poorest countries at the time and asked if there had been significant change since then...

The obvious answer was..no, we are still in the top 15 poorest countries in the world, we are perhaps worse off than we were in the early 1990s (I cannot support that empirically, but it's a view I hold)...and the question she then asked was... why? What are the causes of this lack of progress?

My answer... LEADERSHIP

I know we can go into arguments about economic development..under/unexploited sectors...educated and empowered citizenry etc...but it all boils down to leadership.

Malawi has got a lot of potential in its people and resources, but these remain unexploited because of decisions that are made by our leaders. As we were approaching the 50 years of independence celebrations (were they really celebrations), rather 50 years of independence anniversary...it struck me that a good part of the things we can point to as marks of our development can all be traced back to the first 30 years of independence, the Kamuzu period. In fact even our laws... a good number of the sectoral legislation and regulations date back to the Kamuzu period...which means in essence, Kamuzu is still governing the country..

We have had 20 years of democracy..and what do we really have to show for those 20 years? Increased corruption, nepotism in appointments to key positions, and this one...a growing dependency on hand outs...

There used to be a time when I would go visit my grandparents in the village and they would not expect to receive anything from "aku tauni"... in fact they would give you things to take back with you...now, I go to the village and I am expected to carry everything I need with me including food..and on top of that have something to give to my relatives...people have forgotten what a blessing it is to give others...to share... there is now no self sufficiency...And most of this can be traced back to the period after 1994... there was a period where we made some considerable progress...but that was short lived...

Government is now subsidising consumption rather than encouraging production...the most recent example is the proposed subsidy on cement and iron sheets...why not subsidise production so that a larger part of the population, the more productive part actually benefits from it... it would reduce the costs of construction which have a spill over effect on other areas of the economy...

Additionally, do you know that in Malawi we no longer have large or middle scale farmers? Except maybe for Crown who have only started recently...the rest of our farmers are small scale farmers... The reason why we are still just focusing on small scale farmers? Well... it gives someone political mileage... our leaders are focusing on themselves and the next term.. rather than looking at what will benefit Malawi in the long run...

I mean...let's have a look at our 4 past presidents...what can we say is their legacy? What are the positive things we can point to?... The one that stands out amongst the 4 is Kamuzu Banda...and for about 5 years... Bingu also did some good work...and by that I am not talking about the 5 star hotel...which is yet to be fully opened... Our leaders have generally underperformed..and that is the reason why we have not made much progress in the last 20 years...

So this is my conclusion... we improve on the type of leaders we have in Government and our country will make considerable progress....