No More Free Sympathy!

Malawi’s opposition leader has recently been in the media crying and laboring to monopolize our attention and sympathy for himself and his party by moaning that rigging of the general elections next year has already started. Humanity and nature’s instincts urge us without question nor hesitancy to immediately heed the emotional complaints of those crying and seeking mercy. We are not in control of who to sympathize with for this is the prerogative of our emotions. It is emotions that forcefully and without consultations overtake us in such situations. Yet there are times for one reason or the other we find ourselves failing to roll out our sympathy for those pleading it even if everybody or indeed most are obeying their instincts.

As the leader of opposition was making his clarion call for the rest of us to invoke feelings of sympathy to duty, I for once managed to tame my instincts. I afforded to be economical with my feelings and I discovered that it was indeed worthwhile not to have called them to duty on account of the content of Hon John Tembo’s pleas. Now I think that I will still continue being stingy with my sympathy towards politicians.

I don’t want to go into the atomic content of Hon. Tembo's worries except to wholly present it by stating that he is worried that the way the registration process is progressing there are bound to be some ripple effects on the outcome of the election. He has worries about the independence of the Electoral Commission that it is manipulated by the government and that it is not independent as it ought to be. Now Hon Tembo is not being perfectionist for being a fellow mortal he is always mindful that perfection is not of this world hence it is improper to accept a near perfect work from anyone. For him this is a scheme by a government that is up to no good intent except that of rigging the elections. For him as quoted in the Nation newsonline: “Rigging has started”. Now Tembo is not just a media professional who would want to rush to us and claim the accolades of the first to bring to us the prized Breaking News. Be not fooled. Tembo is not a journalist for you to take his assertions as being purely informative. Those that said one man’s food is another man’s poison couldn’t find any other time for vindication. Tembo is least interested in having us just be informed of rigging that has just started. His interest and cause are greater than that of the scribes. He is rallying for our precious sympathy.

Now let us take his claim as truth that the rigging has started as he so ceremoniously announces (as though it were anything enviable). If the government is rigging, whose direct responsibility is it to ensure that this does not take place? Most of us on the patriotic side will immediately claim it is everybody’s duty. But we must pinpoint specifically whose or else the public goat will indeed die of hunger. Our society is such a one where we have clearly shared the duties. No one is responsible for everything and everyone is responsible for something. We can now go and ask he or she whom I entrusted with the onus of making laws as to what has to be done or not in my society. These are the law makers whom we have tasked with legislating against all such vices as election rigging. Now this is the legion one of whose sides Tembo has been leading, as Leader of Opposition. Tembo has had a majority of legislators on his side both as MCP president and leader of the opposition in Parliament. Actually in his wailings about the rigging Tembo draws us all back to 2004 where he claims he had had an election win snatched from him due to rigging.

It is clear that Tembo knew that there is a possibility of governments rigging an election. From his recent cries he occurs to me to be a person who has magnificently huge hatred against vices such as cheating. He must be a man who likes defending and living for honesty, fairness and nobility. How privileged for the rest of us to have such a man as leader of the most numerous side of our law makers! Such a virtue pursuing man leading those that make laws! Who would ask for more? Law is meant to deter evil. Tembo knows this very well and so do we all. As to why in that privileged position we entrusted him with Tembo could not push for reforms of electoral laws baffles my reason. That is my duty which I delegated to him. Therefore that was just his duty. He had the influence. He changed the law in the form of the national budget about funding of MBC, TVM, and the Ministry of Information. Reason? These were falling short of the virtues of fairness and respect for human decency. Brilliant that was!! What rising up to the occasion!!! Then was the monumental section 65 which he spearheaded just for the zeal the man has for fairness. Despite the fact that his party had lost a meager three MPs to the ruling side Tembo overzealously and gallantly nearly succeeded in grinding government to a stop in his spirited drive to let the renegade MPs face the law they broke with classic impunity. Not with the law he cherishes!! What commendable zeal! I thus fail to make out how this steel zeal manages to melt down and later evaporate in matters of electoral reform. I fail to see why the domination Tembo commanded could not be used to emancipate the Electoral Commission so that hence forth no one and indeed no one henceforth manipulates the operations of an independent Electoral Commission and hence leave its sanctity intact?

Conventional philosophical logic has a fallacy called 'You-too' fallacy: you cannot dismiss a claim on the grounds that the person advancing it does similar things to those he is speaking against. My stand can therefore be easily claimed to be treading in similar footmarks. “John Tembo failed to change the system when he was far much capable of doing so therefore he has no moral ground to condemn the government’s rigging” so would go the interpretation of my argument.May be it is a sound deduction but I am sure not true. The discipline of politics has logic as one of its ingredients. However more critically important is the cardinal value of motives. Leadership must be encrusted to those who have well set motives. It is hard for mortal man to foretell the motives upon which another man is acting or going to act. This is precisely why Immanuel Kant the sage said that nothing in the universe is good without qualification except the goodwill, the good motive. It is Tembo’s goodwill that is being tried here. Unless he tells us the motives upon which he didn’t ensure a fair reformation of the law, we are not ready to release our tears and now treasured sympathy for him. Unfortunately Tembo ought not to call another press conference to make known why he under-used the powers granted to him? We are aware. Which one is a more enduring course in effect, section 65, MBC and TVM votes on the one hand and a reformed electoral system? The conduct has spoken and betrayed the motives of Tembo. I have come to learn that whenever man acts he is immediately in a moral situation. Immediately he exposes his motives. I have Tembo’s motives for not reforming the law. He is waiting for that prophetic day when he will be the first citizen. There will be the need to consolidate his tenancy at The New State House. Every means will be necessary. By hook or crook. Reformed electoral laws will not be one the favorable conditions that would guarantee a prolonged or even eternal tenancy at the New State House. Better not tamper with them now. Tampering them now in the name of reforms would be digging pits in which they would fall in themselves in their day of occ

Indicting The Malawian Print Media

Since I was very young I have always wanted to legally attain success whatever form of moral definition it carries along in its broadness. As such I positively envied and admired those people of high social standing. There was a time I dared admire becoming a president, via the legitimate way of course. I’m saying ‘was’ for now the things I wouldn’t want happen to me whilst alive is becoming a state president. Thanks to my freely exercising of reason. Practising law and medicine are excessively restricted, so is flying an aeroplane (at least the conventional one). Driving a car on the roads requires a licence so does teaching where you should be issued with a license to teach. Everything requires expertise except ridiculing and battering your head of state. Justifiably or not, it doesn’t matter. There is no reservation to right of entry into the borderless world of scrutinising and blaming presidents. Just as they say football is the only sport and actually one of the few activities in the polarised world of ours that put on one side the diversely rich with their poverty stinking counterparts, the uneducated and the learned, so does free art of bashing the president and his government policies. The media too joins the fray always scampering around to assume mastery in president bashing to the amusement and approval of the rest of the ordinary masses, the ordinary lay bashers. It has been tempting for most lay people to accord a saint status to the media that they are a rare species of humanity dedicated to truth even if it means taking an adventurous extra mile in getting at truth.

I almost started trusting the media. Yes I correctly say ‘almost started’. They took the role of bashing the president and his government in calling for the passing of the access to information bill. It was all over their editorials showing sense to the rest of us the naive that it was all for our own good though we didn’t seem to know it. Everyone who holds public information must ensure they disseminate it to the public. This too has been said to be the mandate of the media that their commitment to truth does not move parallel to profit making but only parallel to the truth and no other thing.

It is not easy not to perceive the Malawian media as the only presently living candidates for beautification by the Pope as contemporary saints. The passion with which they have lobbied for the passing of the access to Information Bill will make even the dissenters nod in approval. I hadn’t been spared of such admiration for a selfless service the media was rendering to the nation. Well not anymore since the past three weeks.

While I was in Malawi somewhere in July, Stanley Onjezani Kenani in his column which runs in the weekly Malawi News complained of the lack of update of online new sites for the country’s major newspapers The Nation and The Dailytimes. I did not fully grasp the relevance and weight of his argument then. Not anymore this moment. Having been outside Malawi for sometime now, I have greatly struggled to get a semblance of an independent news source to keep me in touch with what is happening on the dramatic and unpredictable political stage in Malawi. More so when the citizenry jury is about to go to the polls to deliver its verdict on the political leadership. Even more so when you are addicted to newspapers and would not afford the luxury of staying out of touch for twenty four hours. My country has two major print media houses. Loudly they have both been part of the ceaseless call for the government to especially the legislature to pass the access to information bill. So patriotic and concerned for the importance of accessing information have these media houses been that they have been devoting their editorials and some even giving out space to run columns urging the ‘insensitive’ legislature to acknowledge the moral obligations it owes Malawians by passing the bill. Their appeals were never in vain. At least I also joined them on their wagon and sped with them into the dream world where vital information is readily accessible and how transparent and accountable society is. In that world of imagination, courtesy of the passionate calls by these houses who had all along been believers in unhampered access to public information that whosoever is entrusted with it would ignore and somehow overcome any other temptations of crookedness and injustice that would seduce him into abusing his position of holding information.

Today though, I am afraid that I was indeed only dreaming. The two major print houses, The Nation and The Dailytimes were not at all with me in the dreamland or maybe I should say that I was not at all with them in the dreamland. This is why today I am indicting them for duping me.

One of the vices the media worldwide has thrived upon is both the condemnation and exposure of double standards. The Malawian media too is of the same genotype. The media serves the people. The media is the self-touted fourth estate of government. The media knows the interests of the average and honesty-longing masses. The media knows the people hate double standards. They hate double standards by politicians. They hate double standards by civil servants. They hate double standards from the profit driven private sector. They hate double standards by traditional leaders. They hate double standards everywhere by everyone. So what should one expect when one shockingly discovers the media too has double standards? The lawyers have a better term out of the bagful collection of what is to the layman nonsensical and intimidating terminologies: they call it betrayal of trust.

Betrayal of trust is what I have just experienced. I can no longer locate nor trace the trust I had about the Malawian print media when it comes to sincerity. You see I now know there are thousands of Malawians who are living in the Diaspora at this very moment. These are people of various levels of influence ranging from criminals to professors. They are in the Diaspora yet no dozen hours ever pass without thinking about home. Their home is Malawi. That is where their hearts, memories, ambitions, loved ones and even hopes are. They hence have every right to know what is happening in their beloved dear country. This would have been a problem in the days of yesteryears. No more today. Don’t we have the internet? Isn’t it correctly touted as that mystery which brings the entire world and its huge vastness onto one’s fingertips?

This is why the two media houses saw sense and indeed the full view of it in establishing newsites to keep everybody who cares about Malawi in touch with their country. Given the standing of The Nation and The Dailytimes, this was not just doing the Malawi nation a gesture of goodwill. It is an obligation. They started well. But come and visit their sites later.... It's is pathetic. You have a page for daily news un-updated for a week. You have a news item that occurred in May still glaring on the front pages. You have links to columns and features that have remained undeveloped for months. You also have one of the most awkward search engines whose results are as surprising as they are out of pace with basic search engines’ functionality.
When I conducted my own survey as to why this happens I am informed and I believe it, that it is because these media houses do not make money in terms of advertisements from the online publications. My! My! My! Profits for what? I also hear that they are afraid that their sales will dwindle once they timely update their news sites. Malawi.... Malawi .... Malawi....

What has happened to the access to information zeal? Who isn’t sniffing double standards’ scent here? Profit versus access to information!!!! How different is this from the DPP politician cum civil servant or minister who for his own benefit and his group’s withhold information relevant for a specific time and releases it ‘anyway’ after the time when it was craved for? I have now established why newspapers must not share the trust we reserve for our kin and our traditional leaders. They have several interests. Even if we concede the feeble concern about less profit, where then does the justification of having May news headlines still reigning the homepages in October come from?? This is shocking! Is this as well the influence of the sensitive hand of profit making? My thought was that I could bear with the appetites and commitment to maximising profits, and would not lose a lot anyway in having the news page being up-dated at 4pm daily after those who buy the newspapers have already bought them so that may be those in the Diaspora might be independently informed. But what do you get at 6pm if it is not May news headlines glaring in the manner of Breaking News?

It should be noted that there are also other people who matter to the country in the Diaspora, or if you differ on their relevance at least the country matters to them and as such they deserve to be given the information about their beloved country by whosoever has that responsibility. This is why for example out of the twelve million many of us we only let in a handful individuals, journalists, to have access to the first citizen whenever he is travelling in or outside the country to communicate with him on several issues on our behalf. Now having an audience with a head of government is not among the easiest things to achieve in the world. But it’s all on our behalf. Thus we at least demand to know about our country through those websites which might start getting rusty now because of underutilising them.

Malawi could be a poor nation. But the standards which are being portrayed by The Nation and Dailytimes’ websites are an exaggeration of what we are incapable of doing. A very bad reflection on the nation. With such neglect should we soon honestly complain of western stereotypes about our nation’s standards. When they criticize us our media will immediately react with vigour. They will be bashed in our daily newspapers. Who has never seen double standards??

MY VOICE

I have been nurturing this thought for sometime. I wanted to put out for sharing most of the views I have for sometime just been stuffing within myself. Not that I am to any extent an expert. Miles away from it!! Its only that I too have an opinion for that which I passionate for - the continent and my country. Sometimes I feel I am overzealously patriotic about the 'little' that is there to warrant my loyalty. But that it is just what it is perhaps, only a feeling. It comes and goes but love endures.

Now here do I go today. This blog is going to address and comment on the crucial issues of African and Malawian politics. These are matters that are alsways on my heart. I think we have more than wider room to make right most of the self-inflicted injustices. We have lots of opportunity to redirect our affairs into the desirable and efficient path that will lead us to meangiful actualization.

The scope for sure going to be wide and broad. Anything that has an attachment to the politics of Africa and Malawi will be pure raw material for scrutiny here. After all elections are around the corner in Malawi, Mbeki has just left the South African hot seat ironically immediately after ensuring a controversial peace pact in Comrade Bob's Zimbabwe. The Zambiams too are having a hsitoric election after the unexpected (as though any death is ever confessed as timely) demise of their head of state who was shaping for himself a legacy few in our region can identify with.

There is just a lot and a lot more awaiting focus.

Enough for the day