Shadreck Chikoti
Muona ngati Gangata ndi munthu wolakwa? You are wrong. All of you are wrong. Inu ndi Gangata zikusiyana pati? Inu ndi cousin wanga mukusiyana pati?
My cousin says I am a stupid man, a man full of himself. Munthu odzimva ngati adafikapo ndipo wamatama.
When I was working in government, I never helped him get a job, nor his wife, nor his children. According to him, I am a selfish man. He gave me his child’s CV, but whenever he asked about it, I only told him that I was talking to people, that I had passed it to a friend, but nothing ever happened. He wonders why I didn’t simply tell the President, or a minister, or a Principal Secretary, someone I was supposedly close to.
He says zakhala bwino kuti mwatuluka mboma, (that it’s good that I left government). In his mind, I had enough power to move our entire village into government jobs, to make passports for everyone, to send village boys to the army or push their names into the police service. As long as I was in government, he believes, the whole family deserved to “eat.”
He says this while angry. But he conveniently forgets that although I didn’t get his child a job, I paid that child’s school fees from Form One to Form Four although the kid failed his MSCE. I financed his wedding too. But no, according to him, I am still a fool.
He forgets that the government hired me because of my writing skills and my education while the child he wanted me to push doesn’t even have a Form Four certificate. But that is not the issue I want to talk about.
The real issue is this: what Gangata said is exactly what all of us think.
In Malawi, expectation is everything.
When you enter government, you are expected to eat.
Once you leave, it means you have stopped eating.
From the supporters all the way up to the politicians, the whole matter is always about eating. The government is simply seen as a feeding place. It’s not about people wanting to help Malawi. It is about eating. There is no patriotism, no spirit of nationalism, no desire to build the nation. Everyone is thinking of their own stomach.
Inu munadya kele, pano ndi nthawi ya Kachamba, Jomo, ndi ena amene adavutikira kuti ife tilowe mboma.
Whether it is DPP, MCP, AFORD, every group believes:
“Our time is now. We should eat.”
But when is it Malawi’s time?
When will the ordinary Malawian “eat”?
Apparently never, because according to this thinking, the ordinary Malawian does not deserve to eat unless he first suffers for a political party.
During our conversation, I asked my cousin:
“Do you even know what my job was?”
He said, “No, I don’t know it, but I know you were in government.”
“And the powers I had, do you know them?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I know you had a lot of power.”
So in his view, every CV that crossed my desk should have become a job.
“Yes,” he insisted. “You should have simply commanded them: give this one a job. Give that one a job.”
This is how the mentality of corruption settles in our minds, quietly, comfortably. We expect people in government to use their power to give us things. This is a common mindset. So when politicians steal or misuse their authority, it is rooted in this very same thinking.
Whether it was Bakili Muluzi TV, whether it was that one you call Kachamba, whoever, it always comes down to this culture of eating.
“They ate, so we should also eat.”
We should never expect any major change.
Back to my cousin. Right now, he is busy collecting every government vacancy posted online and sharing them in our family WhatsApp group, mostly to prove that although I had the power to do exactly this, I supposedly chose not to. He says I used to hide such vacancies. People in the group are applying. One of them has even been shortlisted for interviews.
Today, my child asked me: “Why do you think our country fails to develop?”
I told him: One of the things that drags us backwards is that all our thoughts revolve around poverty. We cannot think beyond it. So when we get a job, when we enter government, when we attain any position of authority, the first thing we think about is not how to help Malawi, but how to escape our own poverty, and the poverty of our relatives.
Gangata is not alone.
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