The oath we never took

On the morning I was admitted to the Malawi Bar, I stood robed, nervous and proud, and was reminded, that I owe a duty to my clients and a duty to the court as its officer. Two duties solemnly accepted.

What I came to realise later is that there was a third duty nobody administered that morning. A duty to my country.

Every profession has its version of that morning: the doctor and the Hippocratic tradition, the teacher before a first classroom, the engineer signing off a first drawing, the public servant reporting to a first desk. In each case, we promised something to someone, but nobody asked us to promise anything to Malawi.

That duty is real and it belongs to everyone. The President holds the country in trust, not in possession. a member of Parliament represents a constituency but legislates for a nation. Your mayor decides whether a city works or merely exists. The doctor’s care must extend to the health system serving all Malawians, not only those who reach a private wing. The pilot and the bus driver carry other people’s lives as routine. The clerk decides whether a citizen at a counter is served or frustrated. The street cleaner decides what a visitor sees of us before a word is spoken. Work treated as purely private achievement leaves the country poorer.

Talent has never been our problem. Malawian doctors, lawyers, economists, engineers and scientists hold their own anywhere in the world, rising wherever merit is rewarded.

They are not different people from the ones at home; they are often the very same. What changes is not the ability but the environment, and ours lacks a shared sense of duty to the country that raised us.

There is plenty to fix, agreed. Efficiency in the public service, red tape, corruption and poor service delivery each deserve their own space. But we will make progress on none of them while we remain a people who quietly enjoy each other’s failure.

When a Malawian breaks new ground, the country stands behind them. Sadly, for the most part, we have thrived on negativity.

The headlines and posts that travel the fastest are those that wound and tear down, feasting on a fellow Malawian’s humiliation.

A country that roots against itself cannot build confidence at home or command respect abroad. We must learn to root for each other not only when we are winning.

We can honour the attempt while remaining honest about what must be fixed.

Our differences in tribe, religion and politics are never greater than what binds us.

Yet we have organised national life around a permanent campaign. After the elections, the winners campaign to keep what they hold, the losers to take it and the rest of us endure five years of noise.

We live in cycles of elections, not development. When the people have spoken, the colours must come down and one flag must go up.

Whoever won, won for all of us; whoever lost still has a country to help build. After elections, it is building time.

Support must never mean blind approval, nor opposition an end in itself.

The same duty governs what we own. Our minerals, land, forests, fisheries and forex must benefit all Malawians, not a handful or the highest bidders.

Too many have become abettors to smugglers for quick gain, looting the very resources that could have built this country.

It shows too in how we work together. Agencies pull in different directions on mining, tourism and land while the national project stalls. Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary behave as though set against each other, when the Constitution intends them to work together. The press shapes whether this country believes in itself, but to frame every effort as doomed is to join the dysfunction it reports.

So, perhaps all professionals should, on entering their fields, take an oath of allegiance to Malawi. Not blind loyalty to whoever holds power, for that is surrender.

If we can swear to serve our clients with integrity, surely we can swear to serve our nation.

Yet the oath would be the easy part. The duty must live in ordinary decisions taken without applause: the tender awarded on merit rather than to a relative; the file moved today instead of next month; the smuggled load reported rather than waved through; the appointment made on competence rather than region.

We have enough talent to thrive, to compete and to walk tall again. The wrong end of every bad record, where we sit on the world’s tables, sums up our habits. Habits can change.

An oath is only a promise made out loud. The country is built by those who keep it quietly, even when nobody is watching.

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