Dear judge Mbadwa,

My lord, the economic challenges facing the country had various people commenting on how the debt levels have soared and how a stalemate in negotiations for a new credit facility from the International Milking Fund (IMF) is negatively affecting Nyasaland.

But we have been brought this far by politicians’ lack of foresightedness and their penchant for shortcuts when transacting business on behalf of the people.

True, we need to manage our debt levels and we need sound economic policies to guide us, but you get an impression that the milking fund is everything Nyasaland now needs and that is something that is worrying, my lord.

All of sudden, Nyasas’ problems cannot be solved by citizens but by prescriptive IMF policies formulated by people who have absolutely no clear understanding of real struggles citizens face at Fort Maguire, Fort Johnson and even at Fort Manning.

My lord, I know that beggars are not choosers, but it is becoming embarrassing for everyone of us to prostitute ourselves to perennial abusers such as IMF, leaving us without any modicum of integrity as they use us as an example of a failed state in various fora.

My lord, empirical evidence suggests that milking fund policies have only managed to make the poor poorer. I don’t want to mention how the IMF policies calamitously worsened the East Asian Crisis in the late 90s and how they nearly brought the global meltdown.

The milking fund claims to promote global macro-economic stability and provide financial stability, but as Joseph Stiglitz has argued somewhere, this is done at the expense of fundamental issues of poverty, inequality and social capital of the affected nations.

My lord, I don’t want, therefore, to repeat my revulsion at imperialistic tendencies that bodies such as the milking fund display and how countries such as Nyasaland are left to wipe diapers of so-called benefactors long after gaining their independence.

At this stage, my lord, we should have been a self-sustaining economy if we were not that greedy and gullible, too, to inoculate our economy with tainted vaccines from the fund that only makes us great beggars who cannot feed themselves.

The problem that this country suffers from stems from our lack of originality and failure to think through challenges we face to come up with solutions that are intrinsically local.

My lord, we have great economists, business people and policy makers, too, who suffer from periodic bouts of paralysis of analysis that they just repeat what others have always said about rejuvenating the economy.

It is a sad reality that we cannot function without tainted inoculations, but the sooner we wean ourselves from  donor dependency the better.

We ought to accept our fate other than be subjected to public ridicule because we want to engage in some katapila.

My lord, it is only when we come up with policies that will ensure Nyasas are responsible for their welfare that we will make headway.

It is high time, as one Mose envisioned; we became architects of our fate by managing the budget and coming up with policies that would stimulate the economy and reduce the dependency culture based on our realities instead of being dictated by Neo-colonialists.

Thumba la tambe amasula ndi tambe yemwe.

Regards,

John Citizen

With Emmanuel LucianoFeedback: whatsapp 09 99 253 633

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