Malawi entered 2015 with much of the country under floodwater. As ever, the real disaster results not from the weather – the low-lying south has always been flood prone – but the continued lack of resilience on the part of Malawi’s people, more than half of whom live in poverty. In a country where 40 per cent of the government’s budget is funded out of aid, the disaster response was led, almost inevitably, by foreign agencies.
Ask Malawians why their government continues to be unable to protect its citizens and their answer will usually be corruption. It is little more than a year since the ‘cashgate’ scandal emerged. This was a murky tale involving deleted records on the government computer, car boots full of cash and the murder of a finance official. This, and the resultant suspension of foreign aid, no doubt contributed to the electoral defeat last year of Joyce Banda, the country’s first woman president, whose succession in 2012 had been a moment of hope.
