Africa-Press – Malawi. To lead is to take people on a journey towards a collectively defined end. But that process begins with a conversation—people must agree where they want to go and, also, define how they will get there.
If a people on a journey don’t agree on their destination, it simply means there is no journey at all. Perhaps that explains Malawi’s journey since 1964, the year we attained our political independence from British rule.
It’s been a journey without a definite defined end. The results, of course, are here to see: we still rank one of the 10 poorest nations in the world. What went wrong? Perhaps, as a nation, we haven’t had time to create spaces of engagement to, collectively, define ourselves and what we need to do.
Lack of such defined spaces, one can argue, could somehow explain what Vice President Saulos Chilima meant during his Mindset Change lecture when he said Malawians are obsessed with trivia.
Yes, Malawians are obsessed with trivia because for years, we haven’t had leadership that set the right agenda for national discussions. Our leaders have, since independence, set the wrong agenda for public discussions and, as a result, we all got consumed with trivia.
The only way to deal with such a problem is to have leaders who, often, appear before the nation with mind-challenging lectures the way Chilima did. He managed to set the right agenda for the nation. That is leadership!
