The Sad Story of Malawi

This is not a headline I expected to be writing. Nor is it my words. It is the title of the Malawi Catholic Bishops’ Lenten Pastoral Letter this year. Over the years the Bishops have proven themselves adept at capturing the national mood and fearless in speaking truth to power. If they say there is a “sad story,” it is not to be taken lightly.

The Pastoral Letter does not beat about the bush. Noting that the current Government has been in power for almost four years, it reflects: “If Malawians ask themselves, AM I BETTER OFF NOW THAN I WAS FOUR YEARS AGO?’, the resounding answer for the vast majority of Malawians is an emphatic ‘NO’. They acknowledge that some of adversities are not of Malawi’s making: Covid-19 or Cyclone Freddy. “However, at the same time, we have witnessed a glaring failure of leadership. Leaders have resorted to be salesmen of words, with no serious attempt at keeping any promises they made to the people.”

Corruption and gross inequality are defining realities: “From the top down, people with high connections are unjustly turning into multimillionaires overnight to the detriment of the majority of people who are being kept in grinding poverty.” In this context Malawi greatly needed a transformative Government that would root out corruption and create opportunity for millions who have been denied it.

Instead, “Malawi has ended up at Bagamoyo – a city on the east coast of Tanzania, which when a slave arrived there he or she lost all hope of being free again. Instead of reaching the promised land of prosperity we are bogged down in the same land we wanted to leave, namely the land of hunger, disease, poverty, corruption.”

It is an exceptionally bleak and gloomy Pastoral Letter yet my own interactions with a cross-section of Malawi society confirm that the Bishops are speaking for the people. Nevertheless, I can also confirm that many are not willing to give in to despair. Instead, like the Bishops, they remember that, “As followers of Jesus Christ, we live in hope.”