As I drove through the Haile Selassie Road in Central Blantyre last Sunday evening, a peculiar absence struck me with profound astonishment. The road, typically with the industrious presence of street vendors, lay weirdly vacant. Not a single purveyor of fresh vegetables graced the familiar roadside. This left me ensnared in a perplexing quandary of bewilderment as to what might have caused the sudden disappearance of vendors.

I was confused because, although the bye laws of the city did not permit street vending, vendors had been tolerated for a long time and turned Haile Selassie into an evening vending haven. Their sudden disappearance was, therefore, not in conformity to known regularity. It was a glaring anomaly.

That is the tragedy of Malawi. Despite the proliferation of regulatory frameworks ostensibly designed to cultivate civility within our society, adherence to these dictates remains a fleeting aspiration. Whether through the lackadaisical enforcement by relevant authorities or the collective apathy of the populace (and I am inclined to think that the former is more to blame than the latter), these systems languish in neglect, rendering the value of discipline an unfamiliar concept in our ranks.  In fact, the majority of our people conceive discipline as a negative abstract, something that robs them of their freedom to do whatever they desire.

“How long will you falter between two opinions?” the prophet Elijah is recorded to have asked the people of Israel regarding their jumping back and forth between Yahweh, the God of Israel and Baal, the Canaanite-Phoenician god of fertility (1 Kings 18:21). The Israelites were caught in a religiously unhealthy state because of their indecisiveness and, therefore, the challenge by Elijah was meant to jolt them into making a firm decision one way or the other.

Our municipal fathers need to be firmly decisive about street vendors, rather than falter between two opinions; either to enforce the municipal dictates or not to. The alternating presence and absence of street vendors on our roads points to a serious problem within their ranks. Any system is helpful to the extent that it is adhered to 100 percent of the time. If the adherence is intermittent, that is tantamount to having no system at all.

Numerous deficiencies plague the systems of governance in Malawi, marked by a conspicuous absence of stringent enforcement of regulatory mandates. Some readers will recall that in a recent exposition, I delineated the findings of a modest enquiry I undertook, aimed at gauging the compliance of motorbike operators with sectoral regulations. Regrettably, the results unveiled a prevailing disregard for regulatory statutes, with a notable majority neglecting adherence altogether. Instances abounded of motorbikes operating without registration numbers, riders and passengers alike flouting the imperative of crash helmets, alongside various other patent transgressions against established regulatory schema.

I, therefore, was pleasantly surprised when I noticed that in Kigali, Rwanda, not a single motorbike (and there are thousands of them as Kigali does not have minibuses) was on the road without having fulfilled all the necessary requirements. It was pure joy to see a whole fleet of motorbikes on Kigali streets, each bike with a clear registration number and each rider carrying not more than one passenger, both duly helmeted.

It is not without a good reason that a system gets developed and implemented. For motorbikes, as for any other vehicular traffic, the regulations aim to reduce accidents, which would otherwise leave people with injuries or indeed cut their lives short. In Rwanda, the incidence of motorbike accidents is close to zero, thanks to the unfailing observance of the relevant regulatory framework.

Towards the end of last year, I was asked to edit a letter that a certain group of concerned citizens had written to the authorities to express their displeasure at the erection of some buildings within a 30-metre way leave of the Chipembere Highway. Understandably, their tempers had flared because of the impudence of the developers. But it was business as usual within the ranks of relevant authorities. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry to enforce the bye laws meant to maintain civility within the construction industry in our cities.

A passionate appeal goes out to all authorities to search within their areas of jurisdiction, to find out what they need to do to avoid limping between two opinions. The revelator warned lukewarm believers that they would be spewed out because they were neither cold nor hot (Revelation 3:16). It does not help to keep hovering between two opposing positions. It breeds contempt.

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