Developments in Mozambique

Colonialism can have long-lasting effects on nation’s mindsets. One thing that it definitely shapes is our sense of affinities. Malawians believe  Zimbabwe is closer to them than Mozambique while Mozambican believe that Angola is closer to them than Malawi. One consequence of this is that we do not often pay attention to significant developments in our neighbour that may have far reaching consequences on our well-being. We know this from experience. The disruption of infrastructure in Mozambique during the liberation and civil wars cost us dearly.

There are currently huge developments in neighbouring Mozambique that can and will affect our lives. First is the reconstruction of the Sena-Beira line being completely rebuilt by the Indian Rites and Ircon consortium.  Remarkably the famous Dona Ana rail bridge over the Zambezi between Sena and Mutarara, which was sabotaged in 1985, has also been rebuilt, and work has now advanced to about 100 kilometres north of the bridge, in the direction of Moatize.  Mozambique is now ready to transport good from Sena to Beira. They have also built a dry port at the cargo terminal of the Sena railroad in the coal town of Moatize, in Tete province. They designed it for handling goods and for some land locked countries, such as Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, the Democratic republic of Congo, amongst others and it  is due to go into operation in September when the railroad is also due to be reopened

According to official reports  “Demand is greater and the area has been totally sold out even before the train starts circulating again between Moatize and Beira. This is a project that is happening ahead of the train. Some Zimbabwean companies involved in marble exploration in Tete province have taken up some of the available space for this port.

There is a Malawi angle to all this: According to an official.

“The 44 kilometre branch line to Malawi has not yet been touched, since rebuilding it is dependent on work undertaken on the Malawian side. Nothing has moved on the line from the border to the Malawian town of Nsanje for more than two decades. There is no point in rebuilding the Mozambican stretch unless the shorter stretch inside Malawi is also rehabilitated “.

How does all this relate to our Nsanje port and the Nacala route? 

To our New MPs

This Monday a new cohort of parliamentarians will be taking the solemn oath to serve the people of Malawi. We thought we might take this opportunity to highlight some of the lessons from the recent elections and the fate of quite a number of parliamentarians.

 Three things came out sharply during the last election on the relationship between MPs and their voters.

The first  is that there is limit to how much people can ride on the coattails of a popular president. Malawi voters were able to distinguish between presidential and parliamentary candidates. And so we had constituencies  where the President won but DPP candidates lost. The message to the parliamentarians is that they have to create their own rapport with their constituencies and be seen to be effectively voicing the concerns of the voters to the powers that be. Simply acting as a sycophant will simply not wash.

 The second message is the need for democratization within each of the  political parties. DPP has quite correctly pointed out that the mismanaged their primaries by imposing names of candidates on constituencies. But the issue goes beyond simply the mismanagement of primary and touches at the heart of governance of our political parties.  Just as the lack democracy at primary level cost the party some seats, lack of democracy at the national level can sot the DPP the presence if the selection of the successor to Bingu is non-transparent and undemocratic. So even if benefitted from the mismanagement, you should be committed to the reforms of your political party institutions. “Chawona mzako chapita mawa chili paiwe”

 The third message is that voters place considerable emphasis on knowledge. People have understood that under our current democratic dispensation simply, sitting to occupy the  seat and shouting on acue “Aye” or "Hear Hear” as one did in Banda days is not enough. This too means that being simply the mouthpiece of the party or President won’t work. Voters expect their parliamentarians to be conversant with key issues and be able to make independent, well-informed decision on where the interests of the voters lie. 

Useful knowledge can of course be obtained from the voters themselves but this will demand that Ministrer listen instead of just haranguing the consitutuences with their speeches. This knowledge can be acquired in formal institutions but it can also be acquired  through main channels. One obvious one is  ardent reading.  In the past few of our parliamentarians  have bothered to use the parliamentary library. A second source as  seminars  but this should not be  for the sitting allowance or for making opening remarks and  then disappearing)  at is source  is  internet are important which is growing fast and is likely to me important when Malawi connects to web through fiber optic to  the Indian ocean. 

A Week in the life of a "Political Analyst"

Mr. Rajat's  view of Malawi politics is fundamentally cynical. A Globe and Mail report had , on the basis of interviews with Mr. Hajat,   presented Malawi electoral campaign as some kind of jamboree or circus  with people going to these rallies just for fun.  Mr. Rajat told an UPI correspondent:

"There's a lot of hype going on. You must remember that politics is the main game in town. We don't have the proliferation of cable TV and satellite TV. Only six percent of our population has access to electricity. So basically this is like a welcome relief from the humdrum drudgery of poverty that makes up daily life in Malawi

   

So why did these fun-starved Malawians spend hours queing  on a chilly election day?

Not to bothered by such mundane matters as  consistence,  Mr. Hajat observes in the same breath

  

"The issues are very simple; there's not much ideology involved. It's all about how is my future going to be secured, how will I get my fertilizer? How will I be able to feed my family, and how will this leadership look after me?"

  

So the  fun-starved Malawians had, after all,  some reasons for spending  hours listening to different speakers and queing for hours on election day. 

  

Mr. Rajat’s predictive power has proved unreliable. As late as April 15, Mr. Hajat thought MP-UDF electoral alliance stood  a great chance of winning the forthcoming elections.  He declared:

 

“This is a formidable alliance because it comprises two very seasoned campaigners”. The MCP cited this expert prediction to counter Afrobarometer’s projection that Bingu would win by 60 percent.

   

Two days before the elections Mr. Hajat, claiming there was really no difference between Bingu and Bakili told VOA stated  :

 

“I think the voting patterns in Malawi tend to be regionalistic, ethnocentric and the final analysis is not the hate speech and character assassination from the podium but really where one's loyalty lies, where one's tribal instinct lies, and where one's future lies.”

 

 As results began to come out Mr. Hajat switched gears and now had this  to say to VOA

 

“By and large with the results that have been both announced and the results that are being displayed, you can surmise that it looks like a tsunami victory for the incumbent, Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika. Basically it shows a huge preponderance of votes in his favour”.

 

More poignantly, he continued

 

“The trends that are emerging show that people are making a difference between the parliamentary candidates and the presidential candidates. The second aspect is that the regional, ethnic and tribal lines that used to influence votes are becoming blurred, and Malawians seem to be voting as a nation rather than as three regions cobbled haphazardly together. It shows that there is a synergy occurring”

 

Religion, region and ethnicity are not evoked here

  

Although he talked about Tsunami Mr. Hajat still seemed to believe DPP would not have the majority in parliament. According to VOA, "Hajat said President Mutharika will also win a majority of seats in parliament by making deals with parliamentarians from smaller political parties."

 

Why did  people vote for Bingu?  Mr. Hajat had a ready answer.   He told the journalist Mabvuto Banda. ""People have voted for wa Mutharika because of his economic performance and the improved food situation ...The other reason is because people are reluctant to vote for someone with a murky past that has not been resolved"

 

Note that there is no mention of religion or ethnicity here.

 

Two days after the election Mr. Rajat introduced us  to a new variable - religious animosity. You would have thought that Mr. Hajat would somehow first explain why a predominantly Christian country had twice voted for a Moslem as president and  what had happened since. Not to be bothered by such matters as logic Mr. Hajat proceeds to give figures. He tells us that 300 Moslems ran for office. (This is the first time some of us hear about  this figure suggesting it really didn’t matter for Malawians.)  Only 20 won. Now, 1100 Malawians run and only 193 got seats.  So 30 percent of the candidates were Muslims and by his logic anything less than 30 percent votes for Moslems shows antipathy towards Moslem. Imagine if 200 Northerners run and only 30 won, would this be evidence of anti-North bias?  

 

Mr. Hajat tells anyone who will listen that he is self-educated. Well, it shows, doesn’t it?

 

The Muluzi Tapes

Now that the electoral dust is settled, we here in Chingwe’s Hole have gone  back to listening  to some of Bakili past  speeches of Bakili available on youtube, including those posted by Mayikolobasi. It may be true, as some have argued, that Bakili demystified the presidency but is is definitely true that he corrupted and banalised it. It is quite remarkable that we allowed this buffoonery to persist for more than one Presidential term, let alone two. Just listen to him talking about Brown Mpinganjira’s sex life and theft. The man contributed to the degradation of Malawi politics in an unpardonable way. It was really poetic justice that his utterances were evoked against his new bedfellows.

 

One final observation on these sordid tapes: it is remarkable that neither Tembo, who Muluzi  repeatedly called a murderer, blood stained, “silent killer” etc  and Mpinganjira who he called a thief who stole K108 million and a serial alduterer , sued him for libel. Were they persuaded by their lawyrers that their cases were hopeless, given the overwhelming eviedence against them?

Politics and international civil servants

The election  of former top international civil servants  to the Malawi  parliement seems to have caused some excitement among Malawi bloggers, with some  going as far as assigning them Ministries that somehow correspond to their past careers READ MORE.

Working for international organizations does not politically prepare you for politics in your country. That skill and political standing you have to cultivate on your own.

This said, many governments have given ex-international civil servants key positions. Only recently, Kabine Komara a senior director at the African Export-Import Bank, was appointed Prime Minister of Guinea  by the new military Junta.

A number of international civil servants have used their previous status to score political points. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. It definitely did not help Simba Makoni, for SADCC boss, in the last Zimbabwe elections.

The record of international civil servants taking on high posts is a mixed one, suggesting the utility of one’s international experience does not automatically translate into valuable experience in national affairs.

The ups and downs of the political life  of Hage Geingob, a UN- ex-official who became Namibia’s first prime minister has some eye-opening lesson for retiring UN  officials who want to venture into politics. In 2002, he was replaced as Prime Minister and appointed as Minister of Regional and Local Government and Housing. He declined the offer and left Namibia for another international job.  In 2004 he left Washington to run for election and won. Now, politically his own man, he is apparently lined- up for the Presidency of Namibia.

Another interesting case that underscores the importance of having your own political base is that of Ousmane Issoufi Maïga an ex-World Bank official  of Mali  This is what Wikipedia has to say

“After the election of Amadou Toumani Touré as President, Issoufi became Minister of the Economy and Finance in the government named on June 14,2002 under Prime Minister Ahmed Mohamed ag Hamani. Subsequently, in the government named on October 16, 2002, he became Minister of Equipment and Transport. He remained Minister of Equipment and Transport until he was named Prime Minister on April 29, 2004. After Touré was sworn in for a second term as President, Maïga presented his resignation on June 9, 2007, but Touré asked the government to remain in place. Following the July 2007 parliamentary election, he again presented his government's resignation, which Touré accepted, on September 27, 2007. Touré thanked him for his work as Prime Minister and appointed Modibo Sidibé as his successor on September 28.”

Perhaps the most tragic of these was Diallo Telli, the first Secretary General of the OAU who langushed and starved  to death in a jail in his own country, Guinea.

We have had some funny cases too. Mr. Soglo, a former IMF official became President of Benin. At each rally he would say something like “The World Bank me this or that. He was nicknamed “Monsieur Le President Le Bank m’a dit” (Mr. President told me”) The opposition was to use that against him  that devastating effective and he lost after the first term. Bingu’s own boss tried to run on that ticket in Nigeria but was unsuccessful.

This said, Bingu and Sirlief-Johnson in Liberia seem to have benefitted from their stint in international organizations. Bernard Chidzeo did well as Minister of Finance in Zimbabwe. 

Source of Bingu's economics

 

There is one point highlighted by all news agencies covering Malawi, namely that Bingu once worked for the World Bank. This is true but the fact of the matter is that intellectually Bingu is very much a product of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the regional organisations he has worked for.  This shows up in his often quite unorthodox economic policies (fertiliser subsidies, interventions in auction floor pricing, plans to set up investment bank, focus on infrastructure etc). His belief in the Nsanje port  and thinking about regional infrastructure quite clearly come from his having been  head of COMESA.  I suppose the World Bank moniker is more reassuring to donors and foreign investors but it does not do full justice to the man's understanding of development.

Election results

This election was at least as historical as the one that ended the Banda regime. This one made the first major break from the politics of mediocrity and opportunism that Bakili Muluzi had cultivated. This election confounded a number of long-held beliefs about political alliances, about the political pull of some individuals, and about the regional and ethnic fault lines in Malawi politics. There are a number of important points we would like to highlight in these preliminary observations about the elections.

First, we can rightly be proud that most of our key institutions functioned well during these elections. Add on to all this the peaceful and decent comportment of the electorate during an electoral campaigned in which hard words were exchanged and provocative statements were liberally sprinkled in the rhetoric.

Second, in many ways this marked the end of a political generation that has dominated politics over the 40 years either as members of MCP or its “Team B” UDF. If a viabrant opposition is to emerge from the ruins of this political legacy, then IT must move beyond the MCP and Team B MCP political culture. Banda era politics was never about issues but about the cult of personality, sycophancy and court intrigue . Those who had learnt politics at his feet were simply not able to think beyond this type of politics and there were at great pains to find new things to do or say. It is interesting that in cobbling together their coalition, the emphasis was not on a common, well thought vision for Malawi but about the allocation of ministries, senior posts in government and diplomatic missions. One can only hope that, chastened, the opposition will regroup around substantive political issues and let the likes of the Tembos quietly leave the scene to lick their wounds or be dragged out screaming.

Third, this election showed that issues matter in Malawi politics. It is often said that African politics are not about issues but about personalities. However this election, more than any in the in the past, was focused on development, food security, education -issues which cut across our ethnic barriers. It is this shift towards issue that may eventually change our politics. Bingu understood this and his constant refrain that the work of his hands speaks for itself was a poignant reminder of what an incumbent ought to be judged – his past performance and his vision. Tembo cited, rather falsely, the performance of the economy while he headed the reserve bank. Rather than articulate its own vision, the opposition wasted time criticizing that of Bingu and his party. Muluzi only claimed that what Bingu had done was to simply implement the UDF manifesto which begs the question why he had failed to do the same during the ten years in office.

Fourth, this election suggested that we ought to have a more nuanced view of the role of ethncity in Malawi politics. Perhaps the one thing that was most misundertood by analysts was ethnicity. The opposition seem to have so convinced some politicians of its centralitiyty that they frequently deployed in their political calculation. t. Thus when Bingu pointed a woman from the South as a running mate, there were outcries (mostly from the opposition) that Bingu was insensitive to the ethnic diversity of the country. What these elections suggested was that there are many social divides along which one can shuffle Malawi politics. But eventually ethnicity did not matter to voters... Our ethnic identities are not so deep as to blind us from elementary facts about our social and economic conditions. It definitely iwas not strong enough to blind voters of the fact the incumbent had been in charge of an economy that had grown rapidly based on agriculture which quite obviously led to improvements in people ‘s well being. Improvements in infrastructure were quite obvious.

The fifth point was that no individual holds any part of Malawi as his or her exclusive fief whose votes he/she can simply deliver to the highest bidder. Poor Tembo had been fooled into believing that Brown Mpinganjira would bring the Lomwes, Muluzi would bring the Yaos and Muslims and Richard Msowoya would bring the North simply by the virtue of his being a Northerner! Whatever they had promised Tembo, they simply didn’t fulfil their promises.

And finally the elections have exposed the vacuity of some of the political punditry in Malawi. Our most cited political pundits simply do not know what they are talking about... They kept analyising politics along the same old lines and seemed to base their views only on whim rather than research and reflection. Listening to our oft cited “political analysts” the coalition was supposed to be a formidable force; the elections would be a a”close call”; Bingu had made a fatal mistake chosing a Southerner as running mate; the economy growth had not benefitted the majority etc. The pundits paid no attention to the only firm empirical poll we had – by Afrobarometer which suggested Bingu would win by 61 per cent ( READ HERE)

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Malawi Elections

The results of these elections are historic. We here in the Hole are in deep reflection over these result that could mark the first break for a politics that bore so much semblance to that of the pre-democracy days. We will come back with out reflections as the dust settles.

Malawi and Millinium Challenge Account

Malawi is poised to finally qualify for the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), a rather innovative aid format from the Bush regime that provides substantial funding over five year periods or so,. A country meets certain governance/policy/accountability standards and then submits a request for funding based on its own priorities. The key documents submitted by Malawi are now on the on the governments' own website for the MCA. They not only contain vast amounts of well-illustrated information on key aspects of the economy but also indicate what Malawi policy makers consider as major constraints on development.

The approach is based on a methodology pushed by economists at Harvard which is premised on the view that “different countries do not necessarily face the same set of problems and, certainly, the relative severity of these problems varies widely”, consist of a “diagnosis” of what are a country’s major constraints and addressing those constraints rather doing everything at one go.

In its Executive Summary main document states, “The study comes with the conclusion that power, feeder roads and international corridors water and irrigation and access to capital represent the most binding constraints for economic growth at the moment. The study further identified other equally binding constraints, namely: an overvalued exchange rate, administrative barriers to trade and regular human capital”

The second document is the Concept Paper for the Energy Sector. The key argument is stated as follows: “

The conclusion of the constraints analysis conducted by the MCA‐M team is that the key to unlocking Malawi’s economic growth is to improve the competitiveness of Malawi’s exports, namely agricultural and manufactured products. This conclusion is widely supported by the Government of Malawi’s Growth and Development Strategy (MDGS) and other development partners such as the World Bank, African Development Bank and Department for International Development.

Whilst there are many underlying constraints to enhancing the competitiveness of Malawi’s exports, the investment case for the energy sector is compelling because poor power infrastructure is substantially limiting diversification of non‐traditional exports and investments in manufacturing. Malawi’s insufficient, unreliable and poor quality power supply has a substantial effect on return on investment1, adding cost and operational risk onto producers of exports which places Malawi as the country with the highest sales losses due to power outages and requires more than 40% of businesses to rely on costly‐generators. This is a burden to existing businesses, compounding other disadvantages2 of doing business in Malawi but also reduces the attractiveness of Malawi to external, new sources of investment

The government proposes US$246.8 million for the power sector.

The third document is the Project Concept Paper for the Transport Sector. Its main projects are:

i) Improved efficiency and reliability of exports and imports on rail transport to ports of Nacala and Beira:

1. Track renewal of 588 km railway tracks which comprise of:487 km from Mchinji-Lilongwe-Salima-Nkaya-Nayuchi railway; and

2. 101 km from Nkaya-Nayuchi railway towards the Mozambican border.

3. Acquisition of locomotives and rolling stock.

ii) Increased access of rural communities to major trading centers and national transport network:

1. Upgrading and construction of roads that will address a backlog of improvement works on key secondary roads linking to the primary network joining the five (5) corridors (main roads, rail and water transportation systems). The selected feeder and main roads include the following:

· Rehabilitation of the Mzuzu-Nkhatabay main road (47.0 km);

· Construction of the Lirangwe-Machinga rural feeder road (74.4 km) in the southern region

· linking to the Nacala and Durban Corridors;

· Construction of the Linthipe-Lobi Rural Feeder Road (27.0 km); and

· Construction of the Cape Maclear-Monkey bay rural feeder road (18.25 km).

iii) . Improved regulatory environment and enforcement of regulations in the transport sector:

One problem with this Harvard approach is its narrow focus on constraints on economic growth and the absence of a long-term developmental vision that would spelt out not only economic growth but structural transformation, social development etc. One can also hope we will soon see the document addressing the serious human capital constraint to Malawi economic development. But that is another matter. In the meantime, read the documents.

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