State house and the Internet

A poorly edited and sensationalist website publishes a report on the President’s health and there is panic in the government so much so that the  President has to be displayed  as  alive and well.

I am not sure what are the journalistic qualities or aspirations of the people at Nyasatimes.  What comes out clearly is that they are not bothered by the niceties of professional ethics and that they operate on a hit or miss principle: Just publish  anything and some of it might be true. And it is clear that their professional aspirations are quite low. The puzzle is why does the government fall for this bet  hook line and sinker?

 My own suspicion is that this reflects a serious misunderstanding of how the internet works and what its reach in Malawi is. It also reflects the fact that the President is ill-served by his press advisors. The habit of responding to every Tom (no pun intended)  and Jerry actually undervalues the Presidency. Some of the press releases emanating from the State house have been embarrassing, to say the least.

One way to counter the presence of the opposition on the net is for the government to have an up-to-date website and so support the media within Malawi (both opposition and official) to have greater presence on the internet.

Malawi: Muluzi's endgame?

And so the MEC has ruled against Muluzi’s candidacy. This marks the end of an illustrious but terribly flawed political life. Quite incongruously, given his chequered past, Muluzi rose to become the first democratically elected President of Malawi. A constitutional amendment had been made to allow him to run. This must have taught Muluzi that one could always fiddle with the constitution to get one’s way

One major contribution of Muluzi to our politics was the demystification of the Presidency. His easy charm, natural affability and humour did away with layers and layers of pomposity, awe and myth that Dr. Banda had wrapped himself with.

Like all who had served Dr. Banda Muluzi was acutely aware of how political power could be used to amass huge amounts of money. And so no sooner had he come into office did it become clear that the country was about to enter a new phase of looting. The difference this time was that corruption, once the exclusive reserve for a chosen few, was about to be “democratised”. Cronies were given contracts to do things for which they had no competence. Millions of dollars to be used for schools just vanished without a single brick being laid. Privatisation was turned into massive asset stripping of the state.The uncompleted five star hotel in Blantyre stands as monument to the rapacity of his regime.

One  political error Muluzi committed was to bring religion to the forefront. Here was a Muslim who had won elections in a largely Christian country playing with religion when Malawians had demonstrated that religion didn’t politically count. He managed to raise huge amounts of money for the construction of Mosques. However even here Muluzi could not keep his sticky fingers from the monies. Khadafi’s famous drive from Lilongwe to Blantyre on Mosque inspection tour revealed that the money he had given were not used for their intended purposes – building Mosques.

Recalling a constitutional provision had been manipulated to let him run for elections in 1994 despite his criminal past, he sought to change the constitution once again so he could have a third go at the state coffers. True to form Muluzi thought he could use money to achieve this by simply buying votes.  He failed but came dangerously close to making it.

He then thought he could put a puppet in his office and run the show from behind. Interestingly Muluzi knew he had messed up the economy big time. So he promised the country an "economic engineer”who would cleaned up the mess but under his control. This was major miscalculation that has soured our politics to this very day. The his acrimony was not only driven by a sense of betrayal but also and even more so by the loss of access to the nation’s treasury.

He then decided to run again and now the MEC has brought that to a grinding halt. Muluzi is now likely to spend a lot of his time in and out of the courts to account for his illicit wealth. What a tragicomic end. He might end up where he started.

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

On Malawi voter registration and identity cards

Someone pointed out to me that the higher turnout for voter registration is largely  driven by something less edifying than democratic zeal  and the sense of duty  to fulfill one's obligation as citizen to  vote. Malawi is one of the few countries in Africa with no system of  national identification cards. Registration to vote thus provides the rare opportunity of having an identification card that is widely recognised in the country. Here is as good an example as any of killing  the proverbial two birds with one stone. 

Apparently more women and young men have availaed themselves of this opportunity than older male. The implication of this on potential voters does not seem to have been fully grasped by our political actors, except perhaps (by design  or default) DPP with its choice of Mrs. Banda. . One obvious piece of advice is that targeting women and young people is a winner. 

Malawi's parlous educational system

 

Going by the recent UNESCO report on education (http://www.unesco.org/en/education/efareport/resources/statistics/statistical-tables/), our educational system is a terrible failure and needs urgent and massive overhaul.  Although our school enrolment ratio in the first year is quite high (145%), 22 percent of the pupils drop out. For all grades the dropout ratio is 64.3 percent.  Compare this with 33.7% for Zambia and 18% for Namibia. Only Central African Republic, Mozambique, and Rwanda performed worse than Malawi. All in all only 34 percent complete primary school.  And only 52% of these make the transition to secondary education. Our net enrolment ratio in secondary school is 24% as compared to 37% in Zimbabwe, 42% in Kenya and 55.9 in Botswana. In terms of internal efficiency of the system. While as in 1999 5.8% of the students were repeaters in secondary schools, the number had jumped to 9.4% by 2006.

Tertiary education is scandalous. The entire system of tertiary education enrolled 5000 in 2006 (up from 3000 in 1999). Compare this with 9,000 for Lesotho (population 1.8 million) and 25,000, for Rwanda (population 8.8. million), 33,000 for Mali (population same as Malawi),  13,000 for Namibia (population 2 million). If we take Lesotho as a benchmark, then we ought to at have at least 54,000 students in our tertiary system!

 

These low levels of enrolment at tertiary level eventually show up as poor performance in our secondary and primary schools (lack of qualified teachers) and poor performance of the civil service  due to lack of qualified middle level staff. In any case with these levels of human capital we are unlikely to transform our economy from a raw material producing one to an industrial one. 

Malawi economy and elections

One area of contention during the next elections will be over who can manage the economy better. The graph below tells an interesting story. During the last years of Banda’s rule the economy fluctuated violently and in his last year fell by a catastrophic 10 percent. Not surprisingly during Muluzi’s first year there was a sharp recovery of 17 percent. Unfortunately this did not and probably could not last and growth rates steadily declined, hitting minus 4.4 and minus 5 in 2001 and 2002 respectively. 2003 and 2004 saw sharp recovery but the growth fell 2.5 in 2005. It then shot up to an annual average of over 7 percent for 3 years, giving the country the the highest three year growth period since the 1960s.

Overall under Muluzi the economy grew by an annual average of 3 percent, barely above population growth, higher then the two percent of Banda’s last decade which actually witnessed a decline in  per capita incomes. Bingu’s economy has grown an annual rate of 6 percent, thrice as fast as the population. The opposition is barking up the wrong tree when it denies the obvious economic growth achieved during Bingu's rule. What it should be asking instead is: Is it sustainable and was it equitable? These are the central political questions.

Malawi economic growth

Saving Malawi from itself?

The AU is apparently concerned about the risk of violence before, during or after the forthcoming general election. It has sent a team of eminent Africans to look into the situation. During its return visit the mission has brought together Malawi political leaders. According to press reports President Chissano emphasised that the mission’s “ mandate is to facilitate inter-political party dialogue; our mission is preventive diplomacy to prevent possible pre-election violence". These African initiatives are welcome, especially given the tragedies of Kenya and Zimbabwe and it they are not to dilute political contestation by imposing “consensus” and the now fashionable “power sharing.

 

My own suspicion is that the mission is much ado about nothing. This will be our fourth multparty election and we have grown up some. Much of the acrimonius language of our politicians and nyasanetters is not shared by the voters.

The effectiveness of such missions ultimately depends on the goodwill of our politicians. If the meetings are used for grandstanding or finger pointing then they will fail. Perhaps the single most important thing that can happen is the strengthening of confidence not so much among politicians themselves but in our electoral processes.