This coming week, President Lazarus Chakwera will make his State of the Nation Address (SONA) at Parliament. Expectedly, it will be full of statements like ‘I have directed this’ and ‘I have directed that’.
Instead of wasting his (and our) time with yet another speech full of emptiness, I have a better suggestion: Let him and his team at State House collect videos of his major election campaign promises, gather around and watch. Then let them painfully go through the process of ticking what he promised and what he has delivered so far. It will be a grim exercise because the Chakwera of pre-2020 is not the same chap sitting in the State House now.
Then, let the bwana and his village of advisers go through all the SONAs he has delivered since he became president. Particularly, let them pay attention to the directives he has dished out to his ministers, the Secretary to the President and Cabinet (SPC) and civil servants, most of which have routinely been ignored.
No-one in the public service takes the president’s words seriously. Why? They know he is all thunder and no action. Civil servants are good at noticing these things. And once they know all you do is bark and do nothing, you are dead.
He threatened to fry those who stole the Covid-19 funds. Did he?
He once told his SPC to remove the then Deputy CEO of the National Oil Company of Malawi (Nocma). The SPC just chuckled, went home for a hearty meal, belched and then went to bed. He once told the Electricity Generation Company (Egenco) and the Electricity Supply Company of Malawi (Escom) to get Kapichira up and running last year. This is 2023 and we have no clue when that thing will start working.
He once directed the Ministry of Agriculture to come up with mega-farms within six months. We haven’t heard any update on this; the only update we have from that ministry is that they lost us a cool K850 million attempting to buy fertilizer from a butchery. Even on this, absolutely no one has been held accountable.
Now Chakwera touted himself as the reformist president. But he came in and has so far achieved zero reforms. Firstly, his choice of SPC in Zangazanga Chikhosi was a calamitous mistake. If you are a reformist president, your SPC has to be a reformist. Chikhosi does not have a single reformist bone in his body. He is a relic of the dysfunctional civil service of the past decades. Chakwera picked such a fossil to lead the public service. Calamity.
His replacement, Colleen Zamba, has not done well either. If not entertaining some dubious chiefs from Egusi soup land, she has all her feet in Nocma matters or sending out interdiction letters of very dubious legal standing. It’s a matter of time before these things catch up with her.
The bwana better be looking for a new SPC, and this time around, let it be someone solid, willing to crack the whip and grab the delinquent civil service by its finer parts. You cannot reform the way we do things in Malawi without reforming the civil service.
Chakwera does not have a State House chief of staff. For months. Another major mistake. A chief of staff is probably the second most important gatekeeper for the president after the SPC. If you look at the State House, the place is swamped with several villages of staff. Most of whom shouldn’t even be there. There is a whole village of advisers who roam the place aimlessly. Of course, these are people who worked hard campaigning for abwana.
But then, you promised us business unusual. So that mob of advisers shouldn’t be there. HE needs a Chief of Staff who will bring sanity to that place, which, since 1994, has become a den of waywardness and ‘unstatelessness’. Just look at them. They can’t even communicate properly. On the night we heard the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) had dropped all charges against the Anti-Corruption Bureau Director General Martha Chizuma, someone at SH (I should say some wise crack at SH) released some funny statement, which really said nothing apart from embarrassing that House. This coming after that goofy sovereignty and Vienna Convention press release from good old Moses, you ask yourself: where did we get this mob of such delicious ineptitude?
So, before coming up with lofty themes for another poetic SONA, pause bwana and reflect.
Oh! One final suggestion bwana. Just before your SONA, disguise yourself and take a minibus ride, especially ya 25, to hear what exactly people think about our administration.
