GANDER IS THE WAY TO NATIONAL PROSPERITY

A persuasive argument:

An average American gobbles down 25 kilograms of pork and products per year. That's more than half a pig per year! But get ready for this— In 365 days an average Chinese—diminutive as he is—swallows 40 kilograms or a whole pig—sweat-and-sour, soy sauced etc! Now if you put the Americans, the Chinese [mainland and Taiwan], the Japanese, the Korean and other pork eaters of the world the number comes to no less than 1.5 billion users!

Interestingly though most of these people raise their own pigs. Yet, their home supply hardly scratches the demand surface. Hence they go around the world looking for reliable suppliers. Malawi—with all its abundant fresh water and arable land is well positioned to join the club of exclusive suppliers. On paper that is because in 2000 the defunct MDC [Malawi Development Corporation] reported that Malawi suffered "a shortfall of 95, 000 metric tons of pork per year"! Judging by the empty [or pork-less] fridges in most supermarkets of Malawi the situation has definitely not improved! This is in a country of physical poverty, disappearing forex and yet unresolved issues about fuel supply continuity. Piggery as an industry is an often mentioned subject without the concomitant action [as usual]. But it is a venture standing against a backdrop of abundant and unexploited opportunities in a country where people still bemoan imaginary "land shortages and poor rains". Again it raises concerns more about action-orientation than brainpower. It poses specter stories of Malawian pork reaching into the unsatisfied global demand. But we appear stuck as ever—so allow me to merely dream of the possibilities.

For argument's sake Malawi could aim to satisfy a mere 5% of the global demand and my ‘National Minister of marketing’ [see an earlier blog] could go around the world selling this pork to a whopping 75 million ready-made mouths taking down—at an average of 30 kilograms each—2.25 billion kilograms of pork per year. Put it differently this is amounts to 56.25 million pigs per year or every Malawian raising three pigs each in their backyards for sale or better yet 156,109 pigs per day or to put it in forex language 16 fully processed 40-footer freezer containers per day exiting the Malawian borders into the foreign markets! Multiply all those processed kilograms by an average wholesale price of MK400 [this is a 2004 price by the way!] and the country will be raking in MK900 billion per year or MK2.47 billion per day! Who needs tobacco—that one-crop-per-season love affair currently fetching under MK240 billion per season? The Malawian pigsties could churn out millions of pigs per day.

With those Chilembwe signs all over forget—for a moment—all those biblical stories about "THE Pig Sins" in the bible. The old story that one. Born Again Preachers and sundry you need to dream in Technicolor. Think lines of stretch limos carrying the formally Malawian gone rich on the harram. Rich guys rush into your churches so that they can be seen to be donating away their newly found wealth!

Gander is the way forward. Malawi is drowning in all the water found in the NSR [New Shire River] I have always believed the Shire River actually starts at the source of the Songwe and stretches down to South Marka. Anything—the bulging Lake Malawi was a geographical accident that doesn’t detract from the fact that it is all freshwater and we are doing very little to harvest it before it disappears into Mozambique. Therefore, instead of fancy road projects—to carry foreign tourists coming here for sex tourism and spread more HIV/ Aids—let’s do something different with our taxes.

The problem is with our national priorities. What ought to come first: producing food or getting the food to the market? Roads first or Productivity First? It is chicken-and-egg but the measure of a man I knowing when to cut into the vicious idiocy. Food first—even Kamuzu got that one right. Yet check the outcomes of his "Gwelo" Dreams? He built "white" things: "tourist attracting" motorways across Malawi and Capital Cities! ADMARC got the disease too. In 1975 they took a good part of the US$300 million peasant surplus and built Kanjedza Village—not one kilometer of irrigation canal in rural Malawi! [Check my blog on white elephants and black elephants for who is actually responsible for some of this madness]

It costs about US$2 million to build a decent—not the margarine-spread things cropping up in Africa—half a kilometer of bitumen road. Meanwhile—with smallholder labor digging lateral trenches off the main canal, a working water pump and ignoring self-liquidating recurrent costs—the same amount will give you [at 2004 prices] five kilometers of irrigation canal or 100 hectares of fully reticulated fields! Since Kamuzu's "roads-first" approach Malawi boasts over 1000 kilometers of bitumen roads have been built but check the merry-go-round that is foreign advice: "Not that many foreign tourists have been coming anyway!" You can never get it right if you listen to these foreigners—forever shifting the goal posts. It is time we serious considered saving our rain-reliant citizenry from this kind of policy hesitation or is it direction-less.

The way forward is to lump in the Nyika "avalanches'"—South and North Rukuru—add in "snaky" Bua and "boa constrictor" Linthipes, "goldy" Lisungwi, "flaky" Nkulumadzi, "baby" Mwanza and "caterpillar" Ruo into making the one vast NSR. It becomes Fresh Water Galore! Next let’s get the "brainpower drought" affecting the Green belt Initiative [GBI] solved once and for all. One does not need to cogitate for too long over where to ask villagers to dig bypass trenches. Just set up the NIA/ NIC—National Irrigation Authority [or corporation if you are into Kamuzu’s fanciful failures]. Let it become the power over the Bangula Dam Development Process too! Through NIC we must purposeful harness of these water bodies and install pig farms all over the places. Forget the excuse from the advisers that Malawi does not need MDC. It’s a lie. They have ZDC right across in Zambia and yet the student IMF/ World Bank consultant who wrote the Malawian ‘restructuring report’ forgot to cross check how the ZDC remains functional where MDC was mothballed! We need a revamped MDC—with proper development experts not accountants and organizational undertakers at the helm—to manage the process of expanding the gander initiative and thus solve the current pork shortage and home-made national poverty!

Here is how the arithmetic works: an irrigated hectare—any extension officer will vouch—gives 15 tons of Sasakawa-style maize output in under four months or 45 tons per year. Multiply that by one rained fed and two-irrigated harvests and determine the amount of pig feed. A pig—raised to 40 kilograms in 6-7 months—consumers a ton of food matter. That is 45 pigs per hectare per year. Multiply all those potential hectares—using a "Food-First" approach with smallholder irrigation actually generating the road building income anyway!—and shock yourself over the development opportunity costs of the "Roads-First" strategy! Malawi has a potential 600,000 irrigable land or 1.8 million hectare that could be irrigated annually at 15 tons giving 27 million tons of green matter or—if we reasonably migrated up the food chain—27 million pigs at 40 kilograms each! At an average of price of MK400 [2004 prices] we could rake in not less than MK432 billion per annum.

So get NIC going urgently—funded by yours truly VAT or fuel/ road levy—just like the NRA [National Roads Authority]. Rome was not built in a day so we should start with an experimental one along the NSR and considering the NSR—unlike the Ganges in India flowing off the Himalayas tops—is in a ditch we need to enroll ESCOM and or her cousins from other countries into this one. They must provide sufficient power to pump the water into uphill reservoirs where the water can gravity towards the NSR.

Who said ‘home made’ solutions to our Malawian economic dire straits are far and away? We just need to jack up our act a bit—know where our ‘white elephant’ priorities lie!

The author can also be contacted on zivaiclaude@gmail.com