Malawi needs compatible core values to achieve Vision 2063 — Gwengwe

World Vision Malawi  director of advocacy and communications Charles Gwengwe has described the newly launched country’s long-term development plan, dubbed ‘’Malawi Vision 2063’’as promising but it needs strategic alliances of key spheres of influence including government, church, media, education and  private sector with compatible core values to fully make it happen.

According to Gwengwe, a vision change without change of values is recipe for failure.

“We may get excited with the vision change but without a value change the vision is defeated before it gets off the ground,” he said.

Recently, President Lazarus Chakwera virtually launched the Malawi 2063 development plan.

The new blueprint—which is built around economic empowerment of the youth as 51 percent of the population is under the age of 18 years—replaces Vision 2020 that expired last December and is associated with a high failure rate as most of its key targets were not achieved during its implementation period (between the years 2000 and 2020).

The Malawi 2063 is anchored on three key pillars namely Agriculture Productivity and Commercialisation; Industrialisation; and Urbanisation. However, Gwengwe said vision ungoverned will lead to another frustration, saying fulfilment of that requires appropriate and enabling governmental core values.

Speaking in an interview with Nyasa Times, Gwengwe who is also the facilitator of Micah Challenge Campaign Malawi  -a movement of church mother bodies on mindset change and policy influence,  said vision and the government were meant to work together, saying government is the vehicle for the fulfilment of the vision and as such government needs to have upright skeletal form that is not bent with issues of corruption, nepotism and ethnicity.

Gwengwe said there is a need to formulate and implement good policies that will propel the implementation of the vision and that the church as well needs to be challenged to champion issues of mindset change and value change; knowing that the fulfilment of the transformation of Malawi is dependent upon appropriate and enabling core values.

He said, the problem with the most people, churches, organizations and the governmental spheres in Malawi is that they are good at creating visions but lack good strategies to make it happen and further called for the president to walk the talk if Malawi is to be transformed.

“We need appropriate and enabling core values to get us to our vision, dreams and goals. We will not get there by vision 2063 alone. Remember without vision, people perish (proverbs 29 verse 18) but without people the vision perishes.

“It is like a person who wants to graduate with honours from college but never does homework or it is like a person who wants a big savings account but spends everything he gets and even more. The core values of these people disable the vision rather than enabling the vision. In my opinion they have a good vision but incompatible core values for the vision,” he said

Gwengwe added that government working with spheres of influence like the church needs to set up the right core values that can be applied to the right vision and this will result in moving from dream to done, revelations to reality, invisible to visible, declaration to actualization, implied to applied and spiritual to the natural.

“What we envision becomes a reality with good leadership and good stewardship because we need the right core values or vehicle to arrive at the destination. Although the person may have many reasons for his disabling behaviour, ultimately he must arrive at the correct behaviour which comes from appropriate core values,” he added

The new development masterplan aims to transform Malawi into a wealthy and self-reliant industrialised ‘upper middle-income country’ by the year 2063, and has projected that if the economy grows at an annual average rate of six percent,

Malawi could attain the low  middle-income status by 2030 ($1006 and $3 955) earnings per person range.

The year 2063 was specifically targeted because the country will have attained 100 years of self-governance then.

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