Cry Malawi Cry!

Thursday 9^th July 2009 I was out in the outskirts of Mchinji that border Lilongwe. I was attending a funeral of a relation. The journey to the village was full of lessons. There is a lot, I realised, I do not appreciate about the continent. I discovered too that there is a lot that we are to do to ourselves if we are to snatch away as many of us that face the ultra-sharp canine tearing teeth of poverty. There is poverty out there. There is undocumented suffering in the outskirts. Yet along the way and throughout my interaction at the village I came to note that which we often ignore and take for granted. It is a paradox. In the depths of the poverty there are common smiles shining on the faces of the children on whose un-bathed tender bodies hung dirty threads of discoloured rags. How they afford to maintain the authentic smile and still anchor their heads in hope, in utter defiance of the poverty reigning on them is outside the realm of comprehension. There is a sense of contentment, hope, and satisfaction that the poverty must have failed to take captive.

At the funeral as we waited for departure to the cemetery for burial we were engaged in conversations about several different things social. How could we fail muse over what absorbs the working hours of almost each of the folks in the village? When the ultimate goal of their occupation is the other side of the coin of human survival, how on earth could we not afford to talk about agriculture and farming? We started talking about fertilisers subsidized by the government in the previous growing season. The people appreciated the gesture (for ethical reasons please read service) extended to them by the government. However the people bemoaned that were accessibility of the coupons timely and just then there would have been maximum benefits from the subsidy program.

I further learnt with great wonder as to how deeply sunk the nation is in the sickening waters of corruption. There is a time when what you hear from the technocrats and elite public officers is what ought to be the primary conception of the matter at hand. Yet there are other matters which minimally demand that the elites’ mouths be muted and those on the receiving end, the grassroots should be the voice of relevance and influence. How things are turning out on the ground is what tells the way progress, development, hope, and expectations of a future nicer than today’s misery is going to be shaped. It was disheartening to hear the sad tales that betrayed the characteristic injustice of our modern times even at the very grassroots. The people mourned and moaned about the escalation of corruption in our community. Manifestly future-threatening in their laments was the fierce fact that the corruption that had almost become a facet of the state’s local institutions was a mere glimpse of what life is on the higher rungs of state power. No sane person who cherishes companionship with reason and is committed to logic’s deduction would be faulted upon concluding that there was more rot up the hierarchy of political power and that this corruption rottenness was merely spreading down.

Malawi is already with great frailty attempting to drag her feet under the obscenely burdensome yoke of HIV-AIDS. This is a challenge of huge proportions that insatiably eats into our national development’s strides and prospects with utter destruction and detractions. Yet the hurdle of HIV-AIDS is dwarfed before the beast of corruption our which our nation is taming to the shock of progress. Corruption is the problem of Malawi today.

Whereas ideally a 50kg bagful; of fertiliser was supposed to be sold at K800 in government-established selling points those for whom the scheme was designed were left pleading, and usually merely wishing they could pay for only the real cost of the bag. The K800 price set by the government was by all means much far from as I later learnt what it had to take for a coupon holding person to buy the fertiliser. Suddenly it became impossible for those local ADMARC officials in the selling points to whom the responsibility of selling the subsidized commodity given to freely provide the services they are paid for delivering without soliciting bribes from the pitiable porous pockets of the poor people. My people narrated to me with a permanently established and vivid sense of resignation as to how they had to cough four times the official selling price in bribes to the selling personnel to get their legitimate and well-deserved share of the input. This was generally the trend in all ADMARC selling points in the area. What baffled me is that fellows from a quite distant village at the funeral claimed that the bribes my village-folks were to give were ‘fairer’ than the one’s they were to give in their respective areas if they were unready to literally spend at least 24hrs on the queue, waiting, hoping, wondering, angry, and frustrated, all in vain as still they would not lay hands on the bagful of input. With raw horror and anger I heard them narrate how you would stand on the queue with just five people ahead of you before your turn to pay the legitimate and official selling price for the commodity and yet you could spend more than six hours stagnated there. In the interim to your disbelief, shock, and powerlessness you would see bags of fertilizer being carried out through both the backdoor as well as right in front of you without the queue ever getting any shorter owing to other people having been served.

But these are people for whom the subsidy program was meant for. From their tales it was unmistakable that the greatest they appreciated about the program’s execution is its exposure of the state of corruption decay our state institutions are ruinously sliding into. An ADMARC depot in Malawi is among the most locally accessible and representative of state machinery. This is why I together with the people of my village feared for our nation. If some cabinet ministers illegally possessed and sold thousands of the fertiliser coupons and then this secret mutates and develops immunity to concealment and finally makes its way to and grabs the front page space for daily newspapers and nothing corrective and retributive is done and we still maintain our national expectations, then we must be a pitiful nation that takes pride in unjustified and perilous self-assurance. We all remember well how cabinet ministers have been caught in the web of smouldering allegations of corruption which in a society of those that esteem justice either instituting an inquiry or the alleged suspect’s resignation from office were to be the expected; and yet life has kept on as usual. We are like a nation that is either undecided or undetermined of the rightful treatment of injustice and any of its semblances. Somehow you are convinced that of the unknown motivations and interests that drive our political leaders surely it is without contention that the national interest is just manifestly none of them. Perhaps this is the nature of human nature as political philosophers of old have noted: that man is by nature selfish. Perhaps our leaders are just being what they are (is it ought to be?): human?

When we talk of nations as political communities we cannot afford to leave the fragile national goals in the hands of mankind’s selfishness. What gives political communities legitimacy is their primary ability and requirement or condition that leadership should never assume independence of the governed unless they have cleansed the leadership from the folly of man’s egoism. This is why the moment a nation does not place hope and confidence in building established and lasting political institutions it in essence is reduced to a mere aggregation of human beings either without a shared aspiration or plain ignorant of how to attain it or worse still an absence of both. The paradox of it all is that owing to man’s egoism one would hardly willingly and freely establish such institutions. It is a product people’s efforts. We should by now stop pleading with political leaders to be accountable. It is our onus to make them be accountable despite them hardly liking it.

Corruption suffocates all other institutions in the nation. It annihilates initiative, hope, and patriotism. Collective national goals are trumped under feet and there is hence zero justification for adhering to order and protocol. Hard work loses its essence as the toiling and worn out hard worker is double sure that making an achievement is through cutting corners through the immoral path of corruption. On the opposite side of the weigh balance frustration and mistrust of both public institutions and fellow nationals prevail. In the end it corrodes the value of commitment to and identification with national aspirations. People finally live in a country and not in our country. They seek every opportunity to evade paying taxes. They do not mind that by being nepotistic they are treading down another national in the painful boots of social injustice. So long as personal ambitions are served in a country it does not matter. Not that they take pride in afflicting harm and suffering on others. Perhaps if they had or were in a nation of their own they would honour the demands of social justice and would have cared. The fact is they do not live in their country. They live in a country. I can say it without fear that many a Malawian today are living in a country Malawi. I am yet to see people in droves who live in their country called Malawi. This is the epicentre of stagnation, retrogress, and deep sinking in the mire of poverty. The nation might be progressing and moving forward yet there is even a higher possibility that through the eagle’s spectacles we are either stagnant or face retrogression.

... But has Bingu brought the candle of hope?

I have never conversed with President Wa Muthalika let alone been any 10m closer to him at any public gathering. Yet I firmly know that he has not enjoyed his presidency right from the presentation of his inaugural speech in May 2004. The man has never been short of foes. Critics have come out of all intents and even in contrasting shapes. Some critics have been propelled by something bordering on vengeance that it has been tricky for both the president and most Malawians to draw a borderline between well-meant criticism and that at the service of personal hatred. Whatever the case there are some fundamental realities that whether we like their taste, doubt their articulators or like them do not alter the content of their truth.

From the very beginning Bingu’s presidency was characteristic of a change in the doing or happening of things on our political landscape. Change whether positive or not or a compound of both. During the first half of his first year in office almost everybody was wondering from where the critics of the president would get the weaponry for criticising him with as it seemed then that almost the entire population was with him. That is the unique part with African politics. Very few leaders score less than distinctions in their first year. People praised Bingu. Who could not when you were for once assured of no brutal and heartless beatings of opponents by strange people who were ironically both ‘young’ and ‘democrats’? Who could not when the cabinet size was almost half of the one of his predecessors? I don’t know how any decent and dignified Malawian could not be happy when he saw promise of no mudslinging and uncivil language saturating the waves of the national broadcasters. There was anticipation that at last heed would be granted to common sense over the (ab)use of state institutions for party agenda. The promises both in word and action were sweet and many, and hence promising.

Then came the generally successful first implementation of the fertilizer subsidy, the debt cancellation and the resurgence of the fight against corruption though it ended in an unpleasant ‘indirect truce’ brokered by political convenience. Then the president’s ratings in people’s minds started shrinking. Criticisms were made against his over-bloated cabinet to which the president responded with a new meaning of bloated, yes different from his inaugural speech one. Then there were constitutional requirements the executive was supposed to comply with but it chose not to abide by.

Soon the pundits and think tanks and those in the world of academia reached a common agreement irrespective of their formulas in their assessment of Mutharika’s presidency: he has done well on the economic front but miserably on the political front. The jury was out.
My contention in this article is that Muthalika’s performance on the economic front has been fairly good. This is pleasing news for a country like Malawi that for almost the entire days of Muluzi’s reign pitched up tent in the economic doldrums and the situation was worsening and noticeable even without the technical spectacles of an economist. In normal circumstances Bingu’s performance should be an re-ignition of a faltering flame in the tangible darkness of despair that had characterised Malawi for a long time, a period where almost everything not only seemed not to work but everything was depressingly failing. But has Bingu brought the hope we need to build on for a prospering and moving Malawi say for the next twenty years?

For Bingu's success to make meaning to the future of Malawi we have to see his achievements and shortfalls not only in the confines of the present. Whenever people have acted without a sense of forward-looking robust achievements have failed to alter the future. Bingu and for sure any next leader of Malawi if he is to bring promise to Malawi we have to work out on the foundations of our success. Building up a nation cannot be a task of a single man no matter how wise and prudent. Neither can it be a task done only during one’s tenure. It is as it is a task that must interlink with the next successor friend or fiend.

Why are many praising Bingu? He for sure has done something new. Not is wrong to praise Bingu. Not that he has done nothing significant praiseworthy. He sure has. But if you are to take notice the troubling thing that threatens a prospering post-Bingu Malawi is the fact that everything is built on a personality – Bingu Wa Mutharika. Nothing inherently bad with this. It is good for a community and nation to prosper and for one individual to spearhead the prosperity. However in the interest of sustaining prevailing prosperity it is safe to consider it dangerous and uncomfortable for designing, determining, and driving national change to be the sole responsibility of one man no matter how brilliant. This is the point that separates achieving leaders and wise leaders who build enduring establishments that outlive the person and generations.

What Bingu and any Malawian leader must do now as a matter of urgency is to build a culture for the prosperity. I strongly believe that lasting change for good or for bad is never independent of a foundational culture. What is this culture? For sure it has nothing to do with dances, and rites of passages. It instead has everything to do with establishing a revolution mindset in institutions. It is about entrenching a spirit that will inevitably either lead to success and prosperity or will severely undermine and incapacitate the re-known obstacles that stand in the way of development. Bingu should set up lasting establishments of anti-corruption, transparency and accountability regardless of one’s prowess, sensitivity to merit and unquestionable integrity in positions of authority. All this ultimately ends up in empowerment of the ordinary people. They should be confident that there is no way they should mistrust the many government workers for they know once they are exposed to be corrupt, the entire system is ready to rid itself of such contamination. It ought not to be as it is that it is the prerogative of a prudent leader to determine when a corrupt officer should face the law. This is the only ground that is conducive for sustainable development. As things are now, I am afraid I can sound as the pessimist that no one is no longer afraid of committing corruption in Malawi. They know for sure that as long as you belong to the right side of the political chasm or you are independent you are beyond the indicting touch of justice. Woe to you if you antagonise the ruling side!

We are all aware of cabinet ministers who have been strongly accused of engaging in corruption since we condemned poor Mwawa to the cooler for the similar crimes. Nothing has happened to them and they have defied calls for resignation claiming they would do so only when their employer the president (only him since the rest of us have no value) tells her to do so. The president has never commented on such allegations and we might not be able to hear what he said but our common sense serves us without fail and difficulty with the realization that their continued holding of office that implies he has not ‘told’ them it is yet time to resign. This is why I am now not seeing Malawi in the next twenty years moving beyond from the present if this is how we build our nation. The task in short is too huge to be rested even in hands of the most prudent and most intelligent human being walking on the planet earth.

For Malawi to take a leap forward and start walking along the path to prosperity we need a legacy that will be greater than one individual. Beyond one president. Something that goes beyond a personality. Through Okonkwo Chinua Achebe notes that no man no matter how great is greater than his people. There is the greatest thing Bingu can give Malawi which I reckon is greater in value than what he can personally deliver in ten years (assuming in 2014 we don’t demand a third term amendment in the constitution). It is laying down a spirit of making things work on their own even in his absence. Such is invaluable treasure that even the next hard core dictator would not be able to suffocate and trample under feet. It is the spirit of letting no one be above somebody. Letting transparency and merit define our structures and institutions of power and authority.

As things are we should always be waiting for a prudent man to come and build what his predecessor plundered. This is if we only count on the prudence of the leader. We need empowerment of the masses and autonomous operation of the various systems of the state. Then we will imagine a prosperous and excelling Malawi even after none of us who is alive today would no longer be determining the tide of the nation.