The peculiarities of Malawi's road system

The extreme localism/regionalism that often colours our perception about how public resources are used, has tended to make a piece of the national road system that passes through a particular area belong to that area. And so the fight for the Chitipa Road is left for people in Chitipa and that to Nsanje to the people from that area and so one and so forth . The fact is that extensions of the national transport grid benefits all over us. Increased integration of Chitipa or Nsanje or the fabulous Lake Chilwa & Phalombe Plain into the national transport system widens the domestic market, facilitates specialisation and benefits  more than the area  that that  particular stretch of the  road  may be passing through. Thus workers  in industry in Blantyre may benefit from Chitipa turning away  from Mbeya’s product to Blanytre-produced products.

Aside from the general considerable there are  some peculiarities about road system than need to be addressed. First all our roads run North South and few take the East West direction that would connect many parts of the country to the great underutilised waterway  that is Lake Malawi..

Second, our road system avoids our valleys – Henga, Shire, Lake Chilwa & Phalombe Plain,  Rukuru  Valley etc which are some of the richest pieces of real estate in Malawi. The colonial government chose to settle in the highlands where they could grow their preffered export crops and where there were less Mosquitos. One consequence of this is that in some part of the country, the best road system passes in the least populated areas. This seems to be particualrly the case in the North  where the entire transport system closely runs along the lake while the areas of dense population and great agriculture potential are left idle. And only now is the rich Phalombe Plain getting decent infrastructure. Without good roads these valleys cannnot contribute to the efforts to encourage irrigitation in Malawi.

In one of the tapes posted on Mayikolobasi Dr. Banda was addressing a meeting at Chiweta while the opening of a stretch of the lake shore road. He observes that the crowd that had come to see him was thin and, to the relief of locally MCP potentates,  he provides an interesting explaination for the low turn out - low population density due to poor soils. He then says that his next project would be a road through the Henga valley with its rich soils and dense population. That was not to be but that is another story.  

Bingu has promised to provide the nation with the best infrastructure in the region. To do that his administration will have to assume a truly national sense of the road system