Where do We go wrong?

After being in Kenya for a month and Malawi for a month, I feel that I can give quite a good report on why it,s taking Malawi quite a while to develop. I'll try and do this without touching the subject of how much money the country has.

First of all, Malawians are the most laid-back people you will ever meet in your entire life. Nobody is ever in a hurry to do anything. On the roads in town, everyone drives at 50km/hr which by the way is really slow if you have places to go. Even if you go to customer care center for which ever company, the people there can't be bothered to hurry up and attend to the customers. As much as it's nice that everyone's calm and all, this won't help the country move faster. We need a bit of aggressiveness and a "go- getter" attitiude.

Secondly, there's a lack of imagination. Even in the smallest things, there is much that could be done to improve services in the country. I went to Steers for lunch and what they do there is; after you order, they'll write your order number on the receipt and you take a seat and then when your food is ready, the waitress will walk around calling out the order number until she finds the person who ordered. Why exactly can they not just come up with those table stands that have numbers written on them, so the person will their order number standing there for the waitress to see? Small things like this will improve services in that country.

Thirdly, malawians are too familiar with each other. Although this is one of the fatcors that make the country so warm and friendly, its also bad for business. The last time a malawian opened a club, it was big hit, everyone loved it, but...it had to shut down shortly after opening..why? because everyone that knew the owner used to walk in for free and get free drinks. If you're malawian you know that it's a very small country. And you won't know just how popular you are until you're in business then everyone knows you and everyone feels like you owe them free services.

Fourthly: Malawians are to scared of risk. There is a general negativity that a person receives from friends and family when they decide to go into private business. When my father decided to retire and do his own thing, almost everyone he knows said "what if it fails?, you'd rather stay in employment". As a result of this attitude, most private businesses in malawi are owned by Indians and nowadays, Nigerians.

Malawians need to wake up before we lose our country to foreigners. Why should they come in and make money on our land as if we have no brains and no education? Be aggressive, being in employment is not even a plan.