BY IDRISS ALI NASSAH

We are hearing pitiful conspiracy theories about how the remnants of the old regime are the ones sabotaging this government.

The Minister of Information wistfully said the other day that government will soon go on a scavenger hunt of the saboteurs with bows and arrows. Good luck, poor Gospel!

But someone should have told him that the saboteurs are our leaders themselves. Instead of fostering a new work ethic when they took over; they began to gorge on the sweet trappings of power. They expended enormous energy helping themselves to taxpayers’ money, appointing their children, friends and relatives into crucial postions, travelling around the world at our expense for nothing in return, then pitifully trying to blame APM, Mwanamvekha, old Goodall Gondwe, Kabambe, even Jomo…everytime they failed to provide solutions to our desperate situation.

Of course our leaders alone do not have all the answers, and we don’t expect them to do. But we expect them at a minimum to be able to provide the necessary clarity of vision so that the rest of us can be motivated to play our part in pulling us back from a potential precipice. We are in this together. The IMF isn’t coming to our aid anytime soon, we all know that. The government has no money other than what it raises through taxation (and quickly wasted away) and what it borrows on the capital markets. And, frighteningly, the population of economically non-viable people continues to grow and that’s a powder keg. Something has to be done, quickly, or something is going to give and it won’t be pretty.

Our hope lies in a change of direction.

Our hope is in President Chakwera leading the charge of that change.

He can collect some of the country’s best brains–at home and in the diaspora–to help him steer us away from looming disaster, and we will be able to ride the big wave.

But should he persist with his current crop of hungry pretenders, we will be doomed and it’s only a matter of time.

The choice is his to make.

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