President Chakwera’s full speech at the launch of 1,069-hectare KAMA Cooperative Mega Farm

Ladies and Gentlemen, when you are the youngest in the family, you find yourself surrounded by older people who are convinced they know better than you, powerful people who police you and tell you what you can’t and shouldn’t do.

And if you are not careful, this can cause you to develop a mindset of timidity, a mindset that has you believing that you do not have what it takes to do great feats.

In fact, in extreme cases, because of the punitive powers of those who police you, your timidity can turn into cowardice, a crippling fear that manifests as a paralysis of analysis.

You can become a coward too afraid to stand up for yourself, your ideas, and your dreams when others older and more powerful than you tell you to sit down and be quiet.

And in the three years that I have been President, I have seen that this phenomenon that happens to the youngest children also happens to the youngest nations. The oldest nations in the world are Iran, Egypt, Vietnam, Armenia, North Korea, and China, which have all been around for over 4,000 years.

Similarly, the most powerful nations in the world by military and economic might are the United States of America, China, Russia, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

By contrast, Malawi is one of the youngest, our birth came less than 60 years ago, and so we are not in a position to compete with the giant nations of our time either by age, or by resources, or by weapons, or by size, or by population.

The mistake we made for a long time is that we allowed our limitations to be used by others to police us, to intimidate us, and to make us afraid to take risks, afraid to stand up for ourselves, afraid to chase our dreams, afraid to take charge of our own destiny, and afraid to even be proud of ourselves, our country, and our compatriots.

We have already seen these condescending attitudes whenever we have championed an idea that is our own, or advocated for a national vision for ourselves, or made a decision that we believe is in our nation’s best interests.

Whether we were launching a program to subsidize farm inputs for our farmers, or embarking on a mission to open an Embassy in Israel, or rewriting our land laws to end decades of inequality and monopoly, or enacting laws to ensure that both government and non-governmental organizations are transparent and accountable, or pursuing our pursuit of mega farms as a catalyst for commercializing,  mechanizing, and diversifying our agricultural productivity, some people from nations that are older than us, bigger than us, stronger than us, and richer than we have told us that we can’t do these things, some even taking steps to silently punish us for doing these things.

That experience is not uncommon for younger sibling nations like us, and if you ask the youngest siblings in your family, they will tell you that the answer to this challenge is not to surrender your dreams in fear, nor to sit idly by waiting for your older and bigger siblings to change their attitude.

The answer is for us as a young nation to change our attitude, to replace our cowardice with courage, our timidity with tenacity, our agreeableness with assertiveness, our docility with decisiveness. The answer is for we who are among the youngest nations to change our posture to the world and to each other.

We must no longer allow our attitude to ourselves and the attitude of others towards us to be defined by what we don’t have, but by what we do have, what we bring to the table, and what we have to offer to the world.

We may not be an old nation, but we are an orderly one. We may not be a developed nation, but we are a dependable one. We may not be a big nation, but we are a brave one. We may not be an imposing nation, but we are an innovative one.

We may not be a populous nation, but we are a peaceful one. It is not what we don’t have that defines us, nor should it be what shapes our attitude as a nation. Our identity and attitude must be shaped by what God gave us.

This is why the MW2063 vision does not only state the kind of country we are determined to become, but also what kind of mindset we as citizens must adopt as an enabler for making that vision a reality.

In a world where many tell us what we can’t do, we must adopt a We-Can-Do-It attitude that defies the naysayers. With a history in which we have had political sovereignty but have had no economic sovereignty due to policies and behaviours that put more of Malawi’s wealth in foreign hands than Malawian hands, we must adopt a Claim-what-is-Ours attitude and a Nothing-for-Us-Without-Us attitude.

In the face of a fashionable trend of praising foreign products, places, and personalities while shaming our own, we must adopt a Lets-Celebrate-Our-Own attitude. And critically, in an economy where we spend three times more money on imports produced by other countries than we make from exporting our own products, we must adopt a Lets-Produce-Big-Time attitude.

 

And that’s what this KAMA Mega Farm represents. It represents our resolve to produce big time. And I want to commend the Ministry of Agriculture for embracing our vision to produce big time.

In fact, today, I want to challenge all of us as a country to stop telling ourselves that we are an agro-based economy. Why do we say that our economy’s strength is in agriculture when we produce so little from agriculture?

If productivity among smallholder farmers is not even at 50% of its potential, then it means that we are not maximizing our resources in order to really become an agricultural stronghold. So the way I see it is that our economy has the potential to have a strong agricultural base, but this potential will not become a true strength until we start to produce big time.

This is precisely the reason why the Agriculture Commercialization Project (AGCOM) exists. It exists to facilitate and resource projects that are ambitious, projects that are bold, projects that seek to produce big time.

And today, we are launching one such project, which is a model of the power of strategic partnership, where a cooperative of over 2,000 shareholding smallholder farmers and a local company have joined hands to leverage the 1,000 plus hectares here to produce big time, in the process creating hundreds of jobs and wealth for the families here.

And because we are serious about this vision, my Government has put in 70% of the resources for this project, amounting to K5.3 billion. We secured these funds as a credit facility from the World Bank.

However, to the farmers of KAMA Cooperative, we as Government have given these funds as a grant, not as a loan, because I am trusting the farmers here to use the funds responsibly to produce big time.

In fact, for the KAMA Cooperative farmers to access these funds, they are taking ownership of the project by making a 10% cash contribution, because they understand that these funds are a hand up, not a hand out. That is the mindset change we are looking for.

As a young nation, not only must we embrace this mindset of self-determination and self-reliance, but we must cultivate our friendships with those who are ready to support us achieve our dreams. And for Malawi, one such friend is the World Bank, which availed the US$95 million in funding for AGCOM 1, some of which we have used to create this mega farm.

As we speak, the World Bank has already made available more than triple this amount to go towards AGCOM 2. So I want to thank the World Bank, represented here by Hugh Ridell, the Country Manager, for being a trusted partner for Malawi in our quest to achieve self-reliance and self-determination.

Lastly, I want to commend Press-Cane, the local private sector company that is working with the KAMA Cooperative to develop this mega farm and serving as its off-taker. What you have done here is to make history as a private sector player by answering the MW2063 vision pillar of agro-industrialization with action.

And I call on other private sector players to be inspired by your example. It is not enough for private sector players to merely pay lip service to the MW2063 vision of an inclusively wealthy self-reliant industrialized upper middle-income economy. What we need is action, putting money where your mouth is, partnering with small-holder farm cooperatives like KAMA in a model that creates wealth for all involved.

For that to happen, what we need is mindset change even in the private sector, the kind that Press-Cane has modelled well here, a mindset that does not view small-holder farmers as people whose products must be bought cheaply and sold for huge profits that enrich others, but a mindset that views the small-holder farmers as co-owners of the business, co- creators of the farms, and co-beneficiaries of the proceeds from the sale of their crops.

That is the economic sovereignty we are creating for Malawians. Thank you for your attention.