Celebrating Mussa Chiwaula's Vision and the Journey We Shared

Today, I mourn the death and celebrate the life of one of the renowned gallant fighters for disability rights in Southern Africa. And I have my own personal story to tell about this warrior.

In 2012, Mussa Chiwaula and I jointly wrote a column in one of Malawi's leading newspapers, The Malawi News. The weekly column was called "(Dis)Ability Focus." It ran on Saturdays for one year to raise awareness about the draft Disability Bill and other disability-related issues.

But that was after Mussa and I had known each other and worked on several disability-related projects together for over ten years. He worked with me in his capacity as the founding Director of Federation of Disability Organisations in Malawi (FEDOMA), and in my capacity mainly as a media and project consultant.

When we were not brainstorming about the next article for the column, we would be reflecting on how we could take this advocacy to the regional level at the SADC Secretariat . We reckoned that most issues we grappled with in Malawi were the same across the SADC region. Yet, there needed to be civil society-driven interventions worth pointing at to address some of the challenges. We needed to strengthen a regional movement championed mainly by people with disabilities themselves.

Mussa believed and insisted that we were capable of unleashing the magic wand that would ultimately help us solve some of those issues, even if it were just a paltry one-thousandth of the problems. A quarter of bread would still be better than none.

At first, it seemed like wishful thinking. But the more we brainstormed ideas, the more he reassured me that this was possible. He was such a bullish optimist. One of the traits I learned from working with him for many years.

Just over a year later, when Mussa assumed the Director General role at the Southern Africa Federation of the Disabled - SAFOD , he entrusted me with transforming our brainstormed ideas into a comprehensive regional strategy document. I accepted the challenge.

This five-year blueprint was designed to steer the disability mainstreaming efforts within ten countries in the region, with a clear vision to expand our footprints to all 16 SADC countries in the subsequent five years. As the Director of Programmes, I also led a dedicated team at our Secretariat in Gaborone to mobilise resources to bring the Strategic Plan to life and coordinate all programmes under Mussa's stewardship.

One of the many projects we implemented focused on empowering artists and craftspeople with disabilities in Southern Africa, which we jointly implemented with Loughborough University London . In 2018, we visited the university campus with some of the craftspeople we worked with within Southern Africa. They showcased their products/artefacts and learned a lot from the experiences of their UK counterparts.

As time passed, we found ourselves filled with a sense of accomplishment, seeing the tangible progress we had made in pursuing our mission and the significant impact we had on the lives of hundreds of people with disabilities in most countries we worked in. What had once seemed wishful thinking had become a powerful manifestation of our collective efforts.

Interestingly, our success only fueled the motivation to explore how to take this advocacy even further; to the continental level and beyond. As someone who values personal growth and continuous learning, I expressed to Mussa my desire to take a short break at some point to pursue academic research in a field I had grown deeply passionate about. I believed that deepening my knowledge and expertise in this field would position me to make an even greater impact internationally.

Little did I know that the university campus that we visited five years earlier in London would host me as a doctoral researcher since October 2022, thanks to the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the UK . If it weren't for the focused and productive mindset, resilience and positive attitude I learned from this humble man, probably I would hardly make it to where I am today.

One thing that remains true, though, is that Mussa's positive influence on my career trajectory and life in general doesn't stop here. It doesn't end with his untimely death yesterday, the 8th October 2024.

His influence will continue to manifest for as long as I live!