Dear judge Mbadwa,

My lord, the statement from the International Milking Fund (IMF) granting us a waiver following Nyasaland’s misreporting of its foreign exchange reserve position brought a sigh of relief to those who understand why we seriously need IMF’s credit to resuscitate the economy.

But the misreporting or bluntly said, the said falsification is also a prototype of how professionals can throw ethics to the dogs just to show some semblance of control.

Misreporting and falsification of data pervades the entire public service in as far as project implementation or public finance management is concerned.  One just has to go to the archives of audit reports to ascertain this.

My lord, I believe we should not have reached this far if we were a little bit careful in our management of taxpayers’ money.

We are architects of our economic downfall and consequently have become a lapdog of the International Milking Fund.

My lord, I repeat that we have been brought this far by politicians’ (current and past) lack of foresightedness and their penchant for shortcuts when transacting business on behalf of the people. We should instead graduate from the conservative school of thought that looks at Nyasas’ problems as being  solved  by prescriptive IMF policies formulated by people who have absolutely no clear understanding of real struggles citizens face.

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 me, my lord.

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, but for how long?

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 organisations such as the milking fund display and how we are still 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 to arrive at solutions that suit our economy.

It is common knowledge, as I dare repeat, that some of our great economists, businesspeople and policy makers suffer from periodic bouts of paralysis of analysis.

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 creators 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. 

Regards,

John Citizen.

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