The Cost of Our Incuriousity

If you are a very curious personality that never lets anything suspicious pass you without delving into its progress, you might have discovered that we Malawians are a very incurious breed of humanity. Oftentimes, we do not care to raise our suspicion in suspicious situations, and the result is that things finally get out of hand.

It was reported sometime back that government was losing more than K2 billion annually in payments issued to ghost workers. Such an amount should in a way have raised some suspicion in the hearts of the authorities long before this year.

The fact that the Ministry of Education tops all ministries when it comes to vacancies clearly tells us that most schools in this country do not have enough teachers. The direct implication is that it shouldn’t have been very difficult for the authorities to discover after many years later that most of the teachers that have been receiving their “salaries” do not in fact exist.

There are inspectors that visit schools on a routine basis and report to the District Education Managers (DEM), and in normal circumstances, these inspectors were supposed to know that the list of serving teachers in their jurisdiction is not proportional to the list of teachers who get their salaries at the end of the month.

Or if this does not concern the inspectors much, the DEM was supposed to know that the amount of money that his office receives as teachers’ salaries is far much more than the ‘legitimate’ one. At least, we cannot expect the DEM not to be aware of how many serving teachers are there in his area of jurisdiction, unless we believe the DEM is a very incurious individual who does not have time to analyse everything taking place in his area of authority.

Now, the top most authorities in the Ministry of Education, and of course, other ministries where ghost workers were prevalent, should be curious enough to finally find the actual culprits in the whole ghost workers scam so that the case does not rest forever like many others involving officials in higher places in government departments.

Many people commit many criminal offenses within government departments, but it appears the problem remains that those who would bring them to book are not very curious individuals such that they either ignore the crimes or just quash them as trivial altogether.

It has been reported before that government has lost thousands of hectors of trees in the famous Chikangawa Forest to bushfires. The loss of the trees means millions of kwacha have been lost to bushfires. Yet, the funniest thing remains that the issue of Chikangawa Forest being destroyed by unscrupulous individuals only got into the public domain then finally rested to its hilt.

It was even alleged that the people who started the bushfires were some disgruntled workers in the same forest. And the question now is: what happened after the allegations? Was anybody arrested and charged with any criminal offense? It appears no one was. Are we such an incurious breed that we fail to find solutions to situations that have been partly revealed already?

Then we have the government forests in the hills of Chikhwawa which are constantly on fire. Are the authorities at the forestry departments so incurious that they do not care who sets these forests on fire? If so, then we should not have trust in these departments.

All in all, the point remains that it seems that many government departments are so incurious about things happening in their areas of authority such that a lot of damage gets made and a lot of money gets lost while the culprits remain scot-free. Such is the price we are paying for being such a very incurious breed.