03/12/2023
THE SILVER LINE OF A CRISIS
Crisis forces development. When things reach the crisis point, there is only one way out, and it has to come through some kind of “shift or change.”
Certainly, you cannot keep on going the way you have been going. Usually you no longer have the same resources anymore. Times of crisis usually reveal how well or how poorly we have managed our resources. Now you will be forced to change your ways, hopefully for the better. This is the “silver lining” of a crisis.
Crisis always forces development. It creates the opportunity for creativity. It provides a powerful motivation to change. You have to invent new ways to deal with old problems. If you are a national leader, you have to collaborate with others to develop a new economic system.
If you are an ordinary person with ordinary job qualifications, you have to start fresh with some new ideas. You have to push aside your regrets about the past and your instincts to be angry and to blame somebody else for the pickle you are in. You have to. In order Malawi not only to survive but to thrive, we must do something new.
Here in the Malawi, with so much of our national economy dependent upon agriculture and tourism, we have to diversify.
That does not mean that “somebody else has to diversify.” That means a lot of us have to diversify.
This economic crisis has greatly shaken the foundations of what we thought was traditionally sound and OK in terms of our agriculture systems and tourism.
I felt like crying when I went to Chiya lagoon on Friday 01, December, 2023. Watching million worthy dollar resources remaining idle and underutilized, made me to write this script, THE BENEFIT OF CRISIS under our main project, “Unlocking the 21st Century Economy.”
Youths, we need to look around ourselves and see what kinds of needs are going unmet. Can we start a business to meet those needs? Our lakes are full of freshwater worthy millions. If somebody from right here in Malawi does not start to make better use of all this freshwater, some enterprising person from China will soon take advantage of it. Or some other leaders, in future will as a result of our failure to export goods to other countries, will further export our potential young men and women to Israel.
Get me well here. All I am only saying is that, the need to find new ways and develop new products and services is imperative in the midst of crisis just like the current one.
It was a very good time for our leaders and ourselves to ask questions like;
1. What kinds of resources do we already have?
2. Do we have high unemployed but well educated and energetic individuals?
3. Do we have lakes and rivers full of freshwaters for irrigation?
4. Do we have unused lands in Nkhatabay, Mzimba, Nkhotakota, Mangochi and other places?
5. Do we have prisoners who are costing us a lot to keep them in our prisons yet they are people full of many potentials?
You know, when a nation like Malawi has failed to ask question 2 above, we shall think like to ease the burn of our crisis is simply by sending our energetic youths to Israel. Folly!
You will often hear it said that the word for crisis in Japanese and Chinese are the same as the word “opportunity”. There’s wonderful truth in that.
You would not think that those two words have anything in common until you realize that the seeming defeat inherent in every crisis holds the keys to an unanticipated victory.
When the atomic bomb for instance, was dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II, it obliterated the city. Over a hundred thousand people are estimated to have been killed. The buildings were leveled. The soil was poisoned.
But the Japanese people took hold of the hands that reached out to help them, and they worked day and night to rebuild their city and their country. You know what happened. Now they are number one in so many categories: their cars, their electronics and a lot more.
You see, if we and our leaders think this way, every disaster gets turned in a new direction. Our crisis becomes our best opportunity. If our learning institutions keep on producing graduates regardless our few companies to absorb them, we cannot consider exporting them to other nations for their benefits at the expenses of school loans. Instead, as soon as we can, we seize this opportunity to revise our education curriculum and build more companies for the fresh graduates.
If you get laid off from your job, you either find a better one, or you create a better one by going into business for yourself just like what Gospel Kazako of Zodiak did. Out of our crisis comes our opportunity. Crisis becomes crisis when it produces crises.
