Currencies of our Society: My Personal Crisis

I recall one morning, speaking to my Social Theory lecturer, Prof Burton, commenting on Postmodernism, telling him that the central problem I had with "thinking in a postmodern way was that their were no handles, and the arguments or sketches provided by postmodernist thinkers just never seemed to land... they remained afloat in the air of academic jargon, so to speak". My professor, without even thinking too deeply about what I had raised, within a split second said to me, "perhaps your inability to think in a postmodernist way is proof of how deeply oppressed your mind has become amidst the prevalent systems of analysis..." and that was it. Lol. I truly enjoy our intellectual encounters.

 

This particular encounter happened some 7 months ago, but it left we extremely uneasy. I am particularly petty in the sense that my mind tends to become easily obsessed with every small claim I encounter on the daily basis. The possibility that perhaps all I knew and understood was merely a prescribed system of order to provide a basis for imbuing familiarity upon social life was too much for me to dismiss. And I subsequently pondered considerably around this claim's possibility.

 

Perhaps nowhere else does one find a similar unrest, and upheaval, to distill reality than within the realm of feminist thinking. Naively, in the past, I dismissed faminism as merely a political activity aimed at engendering a fairness between the sexes. However, further reading into feminism has awakened me to the possibility that perhaps the oppression of women points towards a different sort of oppression that is incurred by both men and women together. In simple terms, "he who enslaves another must commit a large amount of resources and will to ensure that the oppressed party remains a slave." Below, I will attempt to put these seemingly isolated paragraphs into something coherent, using my personal crisis as an illustration.

 

Feminist thinkers, especially those who theorize about the formulation of identity at the infancy stage, essentially argue that the human being, is born with an amorpheous slate of mind. As the child experiences the world, be it through engagements with the family and other people generally, they begin to acquire a sense of self that is distinct and separate from the objects, inclusive of people, that constitute social reality. With this development of self, comes the stratification of the mind, the psyche, that imprints upon the very soul of the person a sort of blueprint for all manner of social transactions. The individual is coded with a lingu franca so to speak, that is essentially the very, albeit intangible, material that composes and orders the social world as it operates. This means therefore that the individual becomes instrumentalized to think and know in a manner that is ingredient for the continuity of the social machinary. By the time the individual comes to see themselves as female or male, they are not only seeing this difference of sex as a matter of mere nomenclature, but rather, this view of self is in fact the self itself, along with all the blueprinting that permits any kind of functioning within the social setup. Essentially, for feminists, this is how patriarchy continues to be self recreating. It activates itself continuously via the creation of new "humans". Anything outside that strict definition of human is insane or not human, just as Foucault argued in his The Order of Things.

 

Personnally, and in deeply reflecting upon my own life, I find that I agree with the transactory aspects of these postulations. Social transactions, here standing for all manner of intra- and inter-human engagement, are not at all natural. They are in fact, despite being realities in themselves, actual manifestations of people's individual blueprints. We hear not merely because there is the propagation of sound through the air, but also because what is spoken co-relates with what we have already been inscribed with as persons within our stratified minds. Take for instance, language. We understand a language because we already know that language. The resultant harmony and coordinated essences of social life vis-a-vis could therefore be seen as, to put it mildly, the familiarities seen in what is completely unfamiliar by human conduits, who relate with each other based on the interplay between internal databases and external things. This position is similiar to what Sassaure and subsequent others argued about signs (signiers and signieds, and even Derrida's critique of the text).

 

Because I lost my mother when I was 12, and then my father when I was 20, I had to, from that age of 12, adopt a view of life that instrumentalized all material and immaterial resources for my own survival and betterment. This attitude forced me to see my environment, both inside and outside myself, as a vast array of affordances or a storehouse of equipment. My duty was to reach into that environment and attempt to form any number of tools that would help improve my position in terms of survival. As a result, even culture seized to overcast me, rather, I reduced it to a mere toolbox for solutions. If certain aspects of that culture proved irrelevant to my survival, I discarded them. If they proved useful, I kept them. Culture became merely a tool for me, as did all other things in the social environment. The one thing I did not anticipate though was that once I had turned my social reality into nothing more than a catalogue of affordances, the very essences and blueprints that I had been imbued within me as a child would also change both in terms of what I meant when I wished to extend meaning, as well as what I heard when others, external to me, attempted to transact meaning. In short, I had began to fracture my blueprint to violate what constituted a normal social transaction. The result, as years when on, in my early twenties, I began to experience a significant crisis of identity. I simply could not relate to much of what was going on in society - that is, much of everything had lost all meaning to me. Furthermore, I felt as though everytime I attempted to render a meaning towards the social, that meaning was often not understood. The only thing I new for a fact was my deep love for my sister. That was never in any state of doubt.

 

To translate all this abstraction into something tangible, and in returning back to my earlier take on feminism, even my relations with members of the opposite sex seemed off. My approach to any kind of relationship is that everything around us and within us was ultimately at our disposal to use for the betterment of ourselves and our relationship in the long run. I would often hear, amongst the more self-aware and outspoken female counterparts, powerful arguments for equality and their aspirations to see a different organization of the social in which men and women had the same status. I must admit that I had never thought about gender issues much except that I simply did not see why men were valued more in society than women simply because it just didnt seat well with any kind of value-free logic, and secondly because amidst the rampant poverty in Malawi, I did not see why I would want to oppress my wife if her success in her profession gave us a better chance to survive and live under more favorable conditions. Again, for me, life is all about affordances and culture is nothing more than a tool that I can be discarded or enforced on the strict basis of relevance.

 

But when I would then get closer to these powerful advocates of equality, I often found that their blueprint for functioning socially was still very much hardwired towards maintaining the prevalent social contract that informed social transactions. To cut a long story short, a man who keeps coming back to the women he is dating or to whom he is married to confer with her over every matter under the sun is simply viewed as a weak man in my society, and such relationships are often doomed to failured. Its almost like, right in our souls, we are only able to relate with one another on the basis of domination and oppression. The prison of patriachy that the activist so powerfully criticizes is also the basis for that activists' own security. The severing of the social order that prescribed meaning and purpose to the entire array of social objects and things we encounter daily for a newer one is too unsettling. Furthermore, in much the same way as I felt when I told my professor that I could not think in a postmodern way, we, both men and women, are simply so deeply "oppressed" by our current arrangements that we simply would not have a language that would permit us to familiarize ourselves with a blank, value-free reality absent of the ordering forces of culture, of "present society", of patriarchy. So the man must continue to man the cage, and the women must continue to woman the space within that cage, and humanity must continue to organize itself around the very limited experience of guards and prisoners that makes up society as we know it.

 

In conclusion.... well, there is no conclusion, except that it is entirely possible to feel completely alien to ones own social environment despite having been produced by and grown up in it. Secondly, a huge amount of helplessness can characterize a life in which one observes the actions of some many others and wonders why those actions are given such transcendental meaning. Why women in Zambia must see themselves as the sole liabilities for failures in their marriages, singing songs such as "I was nothing but today my vagina has set me free" at their weddings. Why women in Zimbabwe must go to great lengths to practice and become experts of the bedroom, going so far as to even make sure that their husbands pleasantries are kept nicely clean and tidy with an assortment of bedside hand towels and scented soaps (as if the man was not able to clean his own body). Why women in Malawi testify proudly about what is clearly oppressive and unfair treatment when men sleep outside the home, blaming their own inability to tame their own loins on one or another inadequacy of the wife.

 

These are simply observations and criticisms I am making about instances of already set up "patriarchical" institutions. A feminist would perhaps argue that all such institutions ought to be abolished in the first place before true transformation can occur. That is, to deliberately castrate the institutional aspects of the social system so as to limit its damning instrumentalization of people. Because in simple terms, oppression and generally "order" is just the language we speak. As Derrida so prolifically summed it all up, albeit in a somewhat different analysis, "there is nothing outside the text". Surely, as a young man who has sought to critique his own culture, there truly is a crisis of identity beyond the cultural transcript of society. However, we must be willing to develop a new system of transactions that would permit us to arrive at a more just and fair society. That transcript could in fact be the genesis of a new modernity, in which social currencies carry within them inherent essences of equality as well as an internal call for expansion and freedom. A society whose anchoring locality, which is presently a system of guards and prisoners, is delocalized into a different system even though I am not able to name it or describe it, so to speak. Recall, there is nothing beyond the text - or to put it sternly, what is not within the realm of transactory currencies, including language, simply does not exist. Fatalistic, huh?

 

I know, there are numerous detours in the course of this writing. But I hope the gist has been transmitted accordingly. Thanks for reading.

 

Cheers!

Intentional Reflexivity: A note on Malawi's Culture within the Discourses of Modernism

Recently, the Justice Minister of Malawi announced the suspension of anti-gay legislation pending further deliberations on the same in Malawi's Parliament. Well, several human rights organizations including, most notably, Amnesty International applauded the move as an unprecedented step forward in the history of this matter in Malawi particularly, and  perhaps even in Africa generally. While it is not the concern of this article to talk directly about this particular case, I would like to point it out that it is unconstitutional for any member of the executive to suspend or shelve any law in Malawi. Those functions are strictly reserved for the Judiciary and the Parliament ONLY. It was surprising that our good old Western Government buddies who are so quick to point out our failures in governance have not yet raised concerns, as they usually do concerning every small thing in Malawi, about this gross violation of the principle of separation of powers. Furthermore, in terms of the social psyche of our country, it proves my earlier arguments in this blog in which I have stated that in Malawi, activism and political participation is not necessarily about Constitutionalism, rather, it is about livelihoods. As long as livelihoods are not threatened by Executive decisions, then nobody cares about what the executive does. Any upheavals resulting from such executive actions are primarily informed by culture as a standard for practises in a democracy as opposed to a reflection of what constitutes democratic practise within the ambids of the Republic's Constitution. As such, activism seldom about the principles of constitutionalism; it’s about the pocket and the stomach. But let’s move right along...

When the Europeans first arrived on the shores of the African continent, they did not find paradise. They found societies. Societies with positives as well as negatives, just like all other societies of the world. Over the next several decades and centuries, they embarked on various projects driven by whatever political and economic pursuits they wanted to realize. Some of the more notable ones were slave-trade and colonialism which impacted on the African continent in a myriad of ways. In fact, such were their pursuits that even some economic-historian scholars have argued that the World Wars of 1914 and 1940 were really wars over African colonies. Their arguments are compelling even though we can’t side-step great atrocious evils suffered by some races simply because other races foolishly thought they were superior. Perhaps it would be better to presume that those wars were the articulation of the various interests of different powerful actors of that period. *I only comment on the war here to skip to the next section of my discussion which is the independence phase of African states.

However, the next couple of decades following the Second World War period saw several African countries attain independence, including Malawi in the 1960s. The following years after independence, African States sought legitimation by projecting government as the solution to the huge number of socio-economic problems that beset African countries. Discourses were marred within the contradictions of efforts to reclaim an African identity, which was supposedly lost due to colonialism and Western activists on the African continent, and the need to modernize and attain to the very same standards of life in Western societies albeit mostly seen via the very same vehicle of colonization.

Overtime, a rapture occurred as the liberationists (the African movements that rose to power after gaining independence) begun to use the material as well as immaterial essences of modernization to portray power and prestige on the one hand, while preaching a message of Africanization on the other to pacify the people into an acceptance of their deplorable conditions. The matter of the African identity became conflated with African culture, and African culture became anything that legitimized the ailing state of leadership on the continent. For example, it was African culture for the President to be seen as the father of the nation and therefore he was infallable and beyond reproach. Meanwhile, the father figure enriched himself and his cronies using that same culture as a means of legimitzing his poor style of governance. Its my opinion that culture, however it was defined, became instrumentalized for oppression.

Furthermore, these were, in a Sociological view, the early indications of the failure of the Africanization project promised at independence. Subsequent occurrences such as the commodity price shock that many attribute to the present heavy indebtedness of African countries found fertile ground for its occurrence at time when the State was living beyond its means, and white elephant projects had to be endeavoured in order to portray some kind of socio-economic progress some 30 years after independence. Meanwhile, the liberationists were gaining great wealth from their control of the State and its resources. And the order of business on the continent, which was stricken by great poverty, became about livelihoods. Politics of the belly were beginning to set in. I wish to not articulate this condition further.

Presently, and specifically in Malawi, this contradiction continues to ensue. Case in point, gay rights. The arguments that abound within the social sphere are that gay and lesbian activities are un-African (that is, they are not of African culture). The concept of what is African itself remains more or less as ambiguous as it was in 1960 when the Malawi got its political, and not necessarily economic, independence of the Britain. Meanwhile, large motorcades that escort the presidency are seen as African; State residences all over the country are seen as African; Condom use for sexual relations with multiple partners are seen as African; and so on, and yet the right for two consenting adults to engage in same sex relations are seen as un-African. Bear in mind also that these laws were not introduced by African leaders but rather by colonial masters prior to independence. I only articulate this argument in order to illustrate a point further down, and not to get into the technicalities of what is right or wrong within the Malawian context. By and large, I think our problems aren’t about wrong or right, but rather what is practical and impractical for moving forward in a project of all-inclusive development.

The point I seek to make is thus as follows. A practical way of going about a relevant African renaissance at this point in our history is to come to the acceptance that we need to begin to relate and compare so many things we have held as static with those goals we seek to achieve. This means that we need take stock of our culture, our ways of life, our beliefs, our customs and other social things, and to match them against our goals, our aspirations, our visions. Then we need to realistically reflect on what it is we can hold on it as assets for moving forward and what we need to drop as liabilities. We must reflect upon our own culture and stop seeing it as something that was ordained by God or some sovereign "other" entity. Culture is merely a tool that permits us to see order in our World in an apolitical sense. In a political sense, culture can be and has been instrumentalized on this continent for illegitimate forms of rule and pacification for deplorable living conditions. For me, the question is no longer about what is modern versus what is traditional. It’s more a matter of what works and what doesn’t.

Modernism then becomes a project of cultural reflexivity and not necessarily a project of attempting to be like Britain or America or Japan. It is simply the task of equipping ourselves towards the betterment of ourselves within the prevalent condition of our times. In this sense, all things become African if they are used to our betterment and progress. And all things become un-African if they hamper that progress. If wearing miniskirts assists our efforts to empower, to put it in an African manner, our beloved sisters, then so be it (*satirically speaking). However and fortunately, the nature of our problems are characterized by evident conditions. People have poor or no housing, have no clean water, have little access to what is poor education, have poor access to what is low quality healthcare, have few opportunities to develop themselves economically and socially, have little influence over the course of their governments because of poor governance institutions and systems, and so on. I say all these things are un-African because they hold us back from a better life, and not because they are the features that have been largely been dealt away with by more developed countries like Japan for instance.

This argument is a mere sketch of many potentially controversial and intricate debates pertaining to numerous forms of life within the Malawian and African context, but the key is to venture into thinking about them as opposed to keeping to this fixed-static state of culture approach we have seen for way too long now. Like I said before, before Europeans came to this continent, we were not a paradise or an Eden, we were a continent full of societies that had negatives and positives. And as such, an African model for development cannot hold culture as a central incontestable and infallible feature of the African society when that culture, even in its pure pre-Europeanized form was imperfect. Again, we need to deliberately and intensively critique our cultures in order to make them more compatible for and with our efforts to develop. That, in my opinion, would constitute a more progressive African Modernization project than the antagonisms we have seen between what is Western and what is African. All things are African provided they become tools for progress, including this Windows HP computer that I so frequently use to upload updates to my little humble blog.

Cheers

Adam Smith's Invisible Hand: Lessons for Governance

Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) was a social philosopher whose ideas significantly informed the discipline of Economics at least up until the late 1940's (the post war period) even though significant opposition had started to emerge decades before that time. The way in which economics theory, particularly the classical and neo-classical schools, adopted and applied his thinking to their theorization served to further remove him from being understood as the philosopher that he was, to being seen an one of the first generals of the field of economics. However, the writings of Adam Smith, as I have come to understand them are potent with implications that point toward the broader operations of a society. And it is for that reason that I have taken to write this article on this blog.

The invisible hand, as proposed by Adam Smith, illustrates the self-regulatory operation of markets as social agents go about selling and buying to maximize profits and utilities, respectively. Furthermore, with the onset of the industrial and scientific revolutions, the production functions of firms or call them, producing entities, has radically been reorganized. The market encompassed not only the theatre of buying and selling of consumables necessarily but also the buying and selling of labor for production and wages also. All this occurred within a context of secularization, that is, the debasing of traditional and metaphysical foundations for power and social organizations towards a scientific base for morality and authority. Science was seen as representing humanities ability to continuously conquer nature by demystifying it, and then going on to use those scientific discoveries for uniform, un-fragmented reason which would form the basis for social bonds and social organization, and production of course.
 

The power of such a background of secularization, and the belief in science as a vehicle for a more uniform, reason-embedded basis for social life, is further advanced by Adam Smith's invisible hand theory. If indeed, social or economic agents were operating within a market for profit and utility maximization informed by a morality and mode of activity anchored in science, then automatically the market's logic of self-regulation was ultimately the expression of the micro-activities of scientific logic. It is therefore not strange that the invisible hand was seen as inherently advancing the interests of humanity. The logic of the invisible hand was as an articulation of the logics of individual actors at their specific markets.

However, the resource allocation power of the market, as an entity in itself was left in flux. As industrialization took deeper roots in the operations of the social, the invisible hand or the market seemed to acquire an existential quality of itself independent of the actual actions of the individual market participants. The price mechanism determined demand and supply. The price mechanism also determined where that supply would be "supplied". And weak demand excluded itself automatically from supply. The repercussions spun without society, and lead to the eventual formulations of theories such as those of the Keynesian School. The debate about this dualism between the market, as an entity in itself, and the actors, as social agents, is nowhere more heavily contested than in the realm of contemporary social theory. Here, it is articulated as a dualism or duality, depending on who is arguing, between social realities (structures) and social actors (human beings), and whether indeed humanity is in charge of their own history, as the enlightenment presupposed, or if in fact the structures (for instance, the market), are imposing on humanity a pre-determined, so to speak, course of history.

Adam Smith's invisible hand points to a more general problem about the actions of people as thinking and conscious agents within social systems that seem to have an inherent ability to impose on the person or people what needs to happen at any particular time in history. Many feel extremely disempowered by such a condition, and reject it as an argument of fatalism. I, however, see it as an opportunity for collective action towards a goal alongside a built-in mechanism that locks activity within certain parameters in keeping with whatever ideals a given people chose to celebrate. This is immediately problematic for some social thinkers because the uniformity as envisaged by the enlightenment period, also presented the human actor as a rational, science informed entity. Post-Structuralists such as Foucault, devoted a lot of time in arguing that people's psyches are not uniform and are not strictly adherent to scientific logic, rather people essentially struggled between pleasure and reason within a world in which the standards for behavior had been steadily corroded by science itself. A good example is medicine, which is a hard science, and yet more and more, it’s become fractured in terms of professional opinions about ailments. It has also become more personalized, meaning that, people are able to access different sources of medicine and apply it to themselves all in the name of Science. Science itself seems to have been taken up by the "market" (here used as a metaphor) and its standardizations have become extremely fractured. There is therefore no single basis for morality or behaving generally (and this is pre-emptive of postmodern thinking).

However, the basis for argumentation or debate within society has not been established in a country like Malawi. The problems that characterize the fragmented state of society in post-industrial countries such as those of Europe can, in my humble opinion, be traced back to a science led expansion logic, especially in Europe following their political revolutions (such as the French Revolution). Late-comers such as Japan, China, Brazil, India, and even the USA amongst others, demonstrate a more "spirit" led expansion logic. Spirit in the sense that certain positions regarding what development and governance entails were only arbitrarily taken. Arbitrary in the sense that science did not inform such positions, but rather, it was instrumentalized in bringing them to pass. I think the Scandinavia is also a good example of such "spirit" led expansion. Reason only served to lead the realization of those positions overtime.

Malawi has that to its advantage. We can either allow a self-manifesting otherness to impose on the general course of our development in the Adam Smith fashion, or we can attempt to galvanize ourselves around a central general idea. Such ideas could be formulated out of a simple effort in which we take stock of our own human suffering and then deciding that we will no longer tolerate it. We could then endeavor to empower our economy and our governance institutions in serving those priority areas while deliberately neglecting others. We can choose to deliberately frustrate the market in accordance with those ideas. This is in keeping with the argument that we can induce a desired course of history albeit at the expense of other courses. But at least then, people can debate about rights or whatever else concerns them on a full belly, under good shelter, under response and efficient government, and a society that generally works. By the way, there is nothing scientific about the American dream or indeed how they call themselves the greatest nation in the world. But these "propagandas" serve to galvanize activity, and to have a more "spirit" led development project than one that is determined by the otherness of automated structures. Such a dry and spiritless liberalism will only culminate in prolonged stagnation for Malawi, or at best, a type of development that seems alien to her people.

I have been reading extensively the literature around the politics of international economics. It is clear from the arguments that pure economics will not sustain a development effort. The visible hand of the State and civil society must intervene even within the contentions of rent seeking behavior, externalities, and other market distortions. The key is not to keep the market efficient, but rather to keep the hopes of people central to the efforts of developing at reasonable efficiency opportunity costs incurred within the market. And herein do we find the central role of governance. It must facilitate the entrenchment of a Malawian idea of progress, and be part of the economic development that must bring about that change we would like to see. This does not necessarily require a big and authoritarian government. It only requires an efficient and responsive one. And of course, one that has decided to grow past the infancy state of its backward politics. Adam Smith, inadvertently, teaches us that through his classic invisible hand theory. And the State led development projects of the Asian Tigers as well as the Latin American Giants further cements my assertions. To end it, albeit poetically, "the market must work for us ~ we must not work for the market."

 

Governance and Aid in Malawi: A Minor Comment

So, Madam Joyce Banda inherits a government on the brink of financial ruin, and a nation equally burdened by regressive politics and economics. Donor confidence is virtually non-existent, and in short, the Malawi economy is bone-dry given that government spending as a driver of growth stalls, while heavy taxes on businesses and consumers alike further hamper investment and consumption spending, respectively. Politics has by this time inflitrated into virtually all spending outlets of the government from the ministries to parastals, all the way down to districts. Tenders are awarded based on political alignments, and yet, even within that premitive model of politics, there is simply not enough juice to cater for all party functionaries. The society becomes fragmented and polarized. Political rhetoric from the then ruling party employs messages loaded with threatening language to deter opponents, and in some instances, the state security forces "act-out" the content of those messages. However, violence is not a private good, but a public one - no one has monopoly over the use of violence. Society follows suite as the resolution of desputes is decided on the streets. In my view, all the crises carrying on in the country are really the result of "bad" governance that had especially managed to choke at the livelihood of Malawi's people. As I have argued before, the Malawian public does not necessarily oppose unconstitutional governance. It really opposes, on the one hand, good governance that negatively affects livelihoods, and on the other, bad governance that also affects negatively livelihoods, even though the potential for political action is skewed towards urban citizens. A case in point is Bingu wa Mutharika's first term. It was not necessarily one that adhered to the precepts of democracy as enshrined in our Constitution. Rather, it was a term in which the ends justified the means. As long as the politics didnt tamper with livelihoods, the unconstitutional governance was "fine".

 

Enters Madam Joyce at a time when it was clear that Malawi was paying for the sin of deporting the Ambassador to Malawi from the United Kingdom. The suffering emanated from an acute shortage of foreign exchange which rendered the country unable to purchase production inputs, petroleum products, drugs, and other necessities. The shortage of forex itself emanated from the freezing of UK aid by the British government, and the subsequent aid freeze from other bilateral partners such as Germany and the United States. And aid freeze itself emanated from "bad" governance. That was the argument. Bad governance had put Malawi into this position. But this was only for arguments sake, because recall, bad governance is only that kind of governance that threatens the livelihood of Malawi's people, and not necessarily that governance that violated Constitutional order. But hey, the Civil Society and the Opposition had to work with something. The bad governance argument perfectly linked donor aid freeze to Malawi's crisis as a result of the prevailing mode of governance. Well and good. Joyce Banda comes in, quickly undoes the various policy positions that indicated bad governance. She reversed certain laws, indicated her intentions to reverse yet other more controversial ones, opened up space on the public broadcaster to opponents, opened up the airwaves to more radio and television stations, and frequently engaged with the media and civil society. The aid taps - due to her magic wand politics - burst open, and Malawi's liquidity crunch begins to ease. Despite the immediate pains of some of her "reforms", citizens still patiently rally behind her, fingers crossed, banking on the flowing liquidity. Hope is percieved in the future, and she instantly obtains the mantle of a good and prudent "governor" all under one hundred days.

 

Now enters a "new" kind of problem. "New" because Bingu, her predecessor, was so beguiled and embroiled by it, that when he (and I give him the benefit of the doubt when I say this) finally saw it for what it was. He tried to step back and re-assert himself as the president of Malawi, and not the president to Malawi commissioned by the donating world. What do I mean? During his first term, and the first ten months of his second term, Bingu was the world's darling. He flew everywhere collecting awards and accolades for wearing the best gentleman's shoes (*sarcasm) to being a champion for Africa's food security. Meanwhile, amidst all his efforts, he was focusing on the wrong audience. He mistakenly assumed that our aid masters (donors) and his actual masters (Malawians) could be seated in front of the same stage, and made to enjoy his same performance. He forgot a defining distinction between the two and that was, donors were not the recipients of his estranged policies. Malawians were. Put simply (*yeah I keep saying that...lol) governance and aid are not the same thing despite the ways in which their respective discourses are inextricably intertwined with and within each other. And now slowly, I see Madam Joyce slipping into the same old "new" problem. She assumes that donor confidence and support is indicative of Malawian confidence and support even though those donors sit in London, Berlin and New York while most Malawians languish under the bare sky, night and day, in poor shelter, going to poor schools and hospitals, wondering about where their next meal will come from. But the question now is why? Why does this old problem remain "new"?

 

Well, the answer is somewhere within the political-historical narrative of Malawi. That is, we all "know" that Kamuzu's decline emanated from donor aid freeze. We "know" that Muluzi's political demise emanated from donor aid freeze. And we know Bingu's administration - saved by his death - was most likely heading towards a catastrophic political implosion due to donor aid freeze. And therefore, if you want to stay in power, by all means, keep the donor aid flowing because - in the politicians opportunistic mind - there is a mystical relationship between staying in power and presiding over social tranquility, and donor aid inflows. The magic wand to keep the aid taps open - again according to that same opportunistic thinking - is somewhere in those words called "good" governance. Good governance keeps the money flowing, and keeps the political agenda to retain power going. This is why I earlier stated that when Bingu - and I gave him the benefit of the doubt - realized the fallacy of such leadership. He immediately turned on the donors and attempted to whin back Malawi's support. The missing piece however was that the economic crisis had been felt too deep in the gut and belly of every Malawian for anybody to listen to him. He found himself locked up in a "bad" governance corner. He had lost both the international audience and the Malawian audience. He was on stage facing an empty auditorium.

 

My comment is not to despute the relationship between the two conditions of aid and governance. My point is to expose it so that our politicians and leaders can appreciate the double-edged nature of that style of leadership. The aspirations of Malawians may not always align perfectly with donor requirements. Frequently, aid comes with it the requirement to implement projects that dont always bode well with nationals. However, the liquidity that accompanies aid pacifies those resistances for the meantime. However, when you proliferate development programmes as a result of increased volumes of aid, and hope to sustain political viability via the liquidity condition of aid, you quickly realize that you plant, with that aid, the very real potential for violent opposition when the liquidity condition is stalled. Here is where donor power sits. In which case, the politician is his or her own biggest enemy in the long run. I do not yet know the immediate political solution to this problem. However, in the long run, it is clear that political stability can be better maintained when the principle sources of government revenue originate from within the state than from without. Bingu attempted to do this upon realizing the fallacy of donor-tune-led politics. However, because of the extreme liquidity crunch in Malawi, he had nothing politically viable to pacify an already agitated people - people he himself had alienated from himself when he danced to the tune of the world while he ignored the realities of his own country. Secondly, political stability is more certain in environments in which sovereignty is exercised directly by the legitimate arms of our democratic government. For president Joyce Banda, it would assist her a great deal to turn away from the international commitments and focus more on the audience that ultimately decides her fate - the Malawian people. If she can successfully identify herself with them, then she will find herself better able to sell her reformist message, and minimize rhetorical polarizations, and ultimately find strong support even in times when the her governance might be considered "bad" or hard on the belly. I believe therein lies a sustainable form of good governance. And man! it sounds so familiar. In fact, it sounds like "constitutional governance" doesnt it?

Therefore, ironically, political leadership in Malawi has more to lose from being undemocratic than being democratic. Democracy enhances citizen-sovereignty, connects leadership more realistically with the citizenry via institutions, and disperses responsibilities more broadly and away from them being concentrated on the person of the president. Furthermore, it sustains the much needed inflows for the aching bellies in our country. And in the long run, places our country on a sustainable path towards self-sufficiency, a further condition for political stability. But hey, thats about it on Governance and Aid in Malawi as I presently see it. Our political leadership need not dance to the tune of external actors more than they need to commit themselves to the just and moral implementation of our Supreme Law - The Constitution of the Republic of Malawi. Hmmmm... Just a thought.

 

 

 

Social Objects and their "Handles"

Developing a science that measures, quantifies, illustrates relationships between various objects or phenomena, or seeks to find "natural" laws that underpin the order of the social has been the quest of many brilliant scholars. Fascinating arguments have been put on the table, luring much interest only to be found wanting and discarded for newer ones. Authors battled intensely within epistemologies pertaining to social "objects". Some constructed huge, overarching theorizations about how the social world operated (eg structuralists), while others focused on how the "micro" elements in specific settings generated meanings, and went on to characterize the fluid, creative aspect of social life (eg Phenomenologists, Ethnomethodologists, and Social Constructionists). Yet others attempted to bridge the gap between the seemingly stable forms that the "social world" maintained overtime with the human subject who is seemingly able to make choices, to reflect upon his/her actions, and therefore play a creative role in the social realm (eg Structurationists). Social theory, in its present state, is characterized by mammoth efforts to reconcile its various positions to each other. Some of us may have heard of terms such as postmodernism, antimodernism, modernism, post-structuralism, discursivity, reflexivity, reflexive culture, discourse and power, and other terms. The positions advance extremely difficult arguments as scholars attempt to arrive at some "form" of theory that could permit us to account for the seemingly amorpheous form that (post)modern society has taken. In its present form, social theory is at once reorganizing itself, reflecting upon its own adherents, and the society it seeks to examine. The process is extremely dense with sometimes very obscure or hard-to-understand reasoning.

 

The reason for coming forward with such an introduction is so that we can begin to appreciate the severe complexity that presides over any kind of social analysis or commentary. Furthermore, the world cannot be sold these philosophical dilemmas. There is a need for the academy to continue to provide answers, or where such answers are not immediately available, to illustrate possible ventures for interim remedies.

 

Blogging about Malawi stems from a deep passion I have for that country. The reasons for such passion could be merely as self-centred as simply wanting my country to do better than other countries. Or perhaps a sense of gratitude for being so lucky as to not to have been born on the wrong side of the socio-economic divide. By this I mean, if my parents had not been who they were, I most likely would not have been who I am. Such an act of fate reminds me that there is nothing special about me except for the fact that I was merely born in a household that could provide for my needs better than over 85% of other households in a country crippled by great suffering and poverty. That second realization forces me to be humble about my achievements, and most importantly to be more concerned - pragmatically - for the wellbeing of so many others whose only "sin" was to be born in poverty. As such, in my attempts to be pragmatic, I must force myself to think in ways that could usher in a better society, and some of those thoughts are what I have written about in my previous entries on this blog.

 

That being said, even with the very little I presently know, I am aware that the library of social theory from which I draw from in order to develop my own thinking is rife with so many problems, some of which I have very generally highlighted above. As such, my going forward is characterized by caution. A caution that accords due respect to the many unresolved and contesting positions within the domain of the social sciences, and subsequently, the uncertainty that becomes inherent within any argument and/or proposition as a result of those prevailing debates. In developing my commentary, I have attempted to take hold of social "objects" that are immediately apparent to my reader who probably has had some experience or has heard about this small country of mine that I so passionately talk about. These "holds" or "handles" so far have been the organization of the Malawi State, democracy, civil society, law and legislature, institutions (including texts such as the Constitution), the citizenry or public, and other "objects" that perform some function economically, politically or socially within the Malawi State. The reason for deciding to take such an approach in my commentary is to achieve a certain level of pragmatism or practically, thereby loading my blogs with political potential. The downside is that there might be an over-simplification of the greatly troubled waters that characterize social theory. But great minds such as J. Habermus, P. Bourdieu, J. Darrida and even M. Foucault, despite being competent social philosophers and epistemologists in their own rights, have had to surrender some of that raw, potent theorization for some down-to-earth political thinking in order to facilitate change. After all, the quest is to change society and not to merely think about it.

 

The society in Malawi is extremely politicized. And we have, in recent years, seen the emergence of powerful political actors within the public sphere. We have seen civil society hold a president underseige. We have seen how the public defied state security forces with firearms only to obey the paper power a High Court order "enforcing" an injunction or interdiction (which also speaks to legitimation between the public and various state institutions). We have seen the rise of powerful trade unions. And we have seen a citizen - who for a long time was considered illiterate and dum - demonstrate a firm grasp of what a democracy ought to be and subsequently mobilize himself or herself to demand their rights. The question then becomes, "how do we take stock of all these political elements with a view to develop a model for our country going forward?" This is what is at the heart of my commentary. For now, I believe that the answer resides not in a specific course of action. I believe the answer resides in a State system deliberately designed to function based on the continuous consent of its people. In so doing, we are all permitted to contribute to our development or downfall together. This position prevents my argument from falling into the trap of determinism, where my way becomes unintentionally portrayed as the only way. Furthermore, it is only through the installation of such an open society that my views can be heard and embraced, or even rejected. An open society permits me to be politically active as well even as a young, aspiring scholar. In short, these are some of the underpinning assumptions that govern the arguments I propose and the solutions I suggest when I engage on an expedition in this " Odyssey of Consciousness". And as it is a journey, they will evolve in the light of new learning and new evidence.

A Commentary on Political Rhetoric (2)

Political Rhetoric and Citizen Dependency: The Case of  the "Freedom Fighter" Ideology

By the time I was born, in the mid 1980's (seems like a long time ago now especially when you meet people who were born in 1996), Malawi had already been independent as a sovereign nation since the 1960s, some 20 years before I happened. Nonetheless, it was not uncommon to hear people talk about the Malawi Congress Party (the then ruling party) in close conjunction with anti-colonial sentiment. President Hastings Banda, the then ruler of Malawi, was said to have single-handedly freed Malawi from Colonial rule (which is untrue because we do know of the role played by the National African Congress before Banda was called from Ghana to take up the role of Prime Minister). Essentially, we were all indebted to Banda, and he was therefore the legitimate leader of Malawi. He had earned it. Seems like a far-fetched idea now.

In South Africa, a second and arguably more meaningful independence was finalized in 1994 when the new and progressive Constitution was ratified. The new document stipulated the end of all forms of segregation starting from race, to ethnicity, to gender and to politics. The promise of a new South Africa was particularly embodied by the iconic, larger than life moral figure of Nelson Mandela who became the first Black President of democratic South Africa. Everything seemed right for true transformation.

18 years later, notable progress has been achieved on several frontiers. The State has undertaken to roll back the massive disparities in social amenities, achieving giant strides in electrification projects, transportation infrastructure programmes, sanitation and potable water projects, the normalization and regularization of health and education disparities, housing expansion, and so on. However, the message embedded in the freedom struggle remains strong. That message is extremely rich in the history of South Africa as it brings back the memories of all that was incurred in order to bring about the free nation that South Africa is today. Furthermore, it is extremely useful for reconciling the numerous social groups back to each other as it preaches messages of togetherness and oneness - helping identify with one another on the basis of a common painful history. It is a vital tool for unity. However, politics is a game of gaining mileage over competitors, and what promises to resonate powerfully with the people will be pushed, sometimes, to the extreme in order to maintain or escalate a percieved political advantage.

The institutional order of the South African State resembles a Federation. There is a national government which seats in Pretoria and is responsible for bringing legislation through the National Parliament, developing broad national policies, and intervening in inter-provincial matters. Then there are nine provincial governments with premiers. They look into developing provincial policies especially aligned to meet provincial needs, pass provincial legislation through provincial parliaments, and oversee service delivery within provinces. They are, however, subject to laws passed at the national assembly level and bound by the Republic's Constitution. Beneath them are local governments which consist of municipalities whose objectives are, amongst other things, to provide democratic and accountable government for local communities, to ensure the provision of services to communities and to promote social and economic development. The government of South Africa is therefore reasonably decentralized, and on paper, it should be relatively straightforward in so far as figuring out how and where things are going array when they do go array. This is, however, rarely the case.

In returning to the issue under discussion, political rhetoric becomes a very powerful tool, in my opinion, for turning public attention from issues that should be looked into towards, on occasion, a seemingly  abstract enemy. It is crucial to point out that government systems and their consequences do not disappear immediately after a change in political power. Especially when you are looking at around a half a century (1948 - 1994) of oppressionist rule preceeded by close to three centuries of colonial rule, as is the case with South Africa. However, even when "backwardness" or a lack of progress is to be accounted for by a presently serving political regime, political rhetoric embedded in a deeply sensitive and sentimental subject as Apartheid and to a lesser extent colonialism can conceal the present regimes own shortfalls and defer the blame onto an enemy who is at that time not physically tangible but, call it, metaphysically vivid. However, as a consequence, there is a dampening of the individual's and community's ability to confront challenges in a progressive and creative manner thereby creating an attitude that is in stark contrast to the attitude that was prevalent and synonymous with South African citizens prior and leading up to the overthrow of Apartheid. Political rhetoric becomes a tool of creating a dependency even though the intended result might be to innocently gain political mileage, however way you may attempt to extricate those two conditions from each other.

In Malawi, similar rhetoric exists. For instance, the donor-dependency rhetoric. The subsidy rhetoric. The political sabotage rhetoric and so on. At the end of the day, a rhetorical sentiment generated by a dominant political party or outfit achieves its end in developing a dependency between those it wishes to cajole and itself. And this in spite of a clearly laid out structure of government that permits citizens to track and bring to account most malpractises in various offices. It is important to note also that these problems become more compounded when they are considered within a party government structure. That is, a system of government in which people vote for a party. After electoral success, the party then decides who fills what capacities in the various organs of State including the National and Provincial Assemblies. In the end, nonetheless, our gratitude is to the freedom fighter now serving within that party who will continue to preach the message of his or her victories in our past at the expense of his or her own accountability in our present, at the cost of a better society in our future. And we, the citizenry find ourselves developing a dependency, shedding our own will to develop and demand accountability, and looking up towards him or her who now serves beyond our reproach for our salvation.

Just a comment.

A Commentary on Hope, China and Wealth (1)

Preamble: Just an "Audacity" to Hope

Well, sometimes one has to take time away from blogging in order to re-examine the ideas one pushes in light of the trends manifesting within the social sphere which preoccupy one's thinking. My commentary has been one primary centred on what Malawi needs to do in order to maximize its potential for development. More specialized disciplines delimit much of such intellectual conversation to certain specific kinds of interventions. Several of my colleagues find that many of our problems manifest in the economy, others find that there is a disorder in the institutional design of Malawi including such institutions as the Republic's Constitution and so on. I concur with much of their thinking. What provokes my commentary is not necessary the question of growth, because undeniably Malawi continues to be amongst the fastest growing economies in SADC, and even in Africa. What provokes my commentary is what I consider a grave need to see an even more rapid growth (maturity) in the business is done within the social sphere generally. And that kind of growth requires a democracy concept that is deliberately designed to facilitate bargaining which should ultimately result in greater tolerance, more representative national goals, lesser political and economic inequality, better accountability from public and private officials, greater institutional integrity in government as well as it various organs, and so on. There is little doubt in my mind that Malawi will very likely cross-over into middle income status within the next 20 to 25years. That expectation might be utopian but I am more concerned with what size of the population will have been excluded or marginalized from the benefits of that economic growth. What proportion of the Malawian public will directly benefit from that growth?

China and Africa: Chinese Aid and Population Pressure

It was an interesting week of debates within the School of Social Sciences at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, here in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Clearly, the Chinese expansion into Africa is ruffling a lot of feathers. Nowhere do you find a deeper concensus of shared concern from amongst a very heterogenous group of African nationals at the University. Beyond just the day to day tussling around how Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Zimbabwe are grossly misrepresented by the international and even African media - the word China raises shared kinds of apprehensions and anxiety amongst younger scholars particularly. The concensus seems to be that China embodies a type of "colonization" that successfully masks itself from the attention of our old and tired African presidents who seem to see Chinses involvement in Africa as something completely different from early mercantilism, subsequent colonialism, and then the rise of the American emprialism, as a global political and economic hegemonic force, from the later 1940s.

Many of my colleagues see China as a nation that has cleverly played into the embrace of our old leaders by not commenting on the politics of individual African States. China does not even raise the question about democratization. Furthermore democratization is detrimental to the expansion of China on the African continent. The simple argument being that with democracy comes the decentralization of State power, and with that comes the requirement for Chinese investors to deal with several factions of a given nation before a license for business can be finalized. Usually, such a deal will consider the broad issues that surround the sorts of investments that Chinese firms seek to exploit in Africa, and therefore having rent implications on the business venture. To put it short, dictatorships are better for the Chinese expansion because only one person decides if a deal is good or bad for himself or herself and the country at large. This decision, it is alleged, is quickly arrived at with a few cheques paid to foreign accounts held by that dictator.

I agreed totally, or shall I say, the arguments move me because images of Bingu wa Mutharika flashed vividly in my mind as a result of those comments. My addition to the debate was two-fold. Firstly, Chinese investment into Africa is inextricable from population "exportation". The exported population safeguards the Chinese investment and repatriates profits back to the home country. Furthermore, pressure on social amenities is shed away from China into the host regions of Chinese investments. As a result, Africa gives China business and carries the weight of those businesses' heavy entourages of Chinese nationals on its already limited public sectors, such as hospitals, housing, education and so on. Secondly, the nature of Chinese aid is seldom in cash. Its often in infrustractural development or, recently as seen in the American and European cases, buy-ups of bad debts (or presently bad assets). With the poor human rights record of China, infrustratural development is heavily subsidized by labor that is severelly underpaid and overworked (eg, prison labor). Buying up bad-debts or bad assets means Chinese businesses are buying up huge assets in Europe and America for a fraction of the price they were before the credit-crunch and the subsequent financial meltdown. The long term returns from these expenditures by China heavily outweigh the costs they are presently incurring. In a nutshell, Africa needs to rethink the open-door policy it has to China. Our greatest assets to the reconfiguration of relations are the very minerals and raw materials China desperatly needs to feed its rapidly growing economy. African civil society needs to realize that activism is as much about gender and the protection of minority rights as it is foreign policy that are likely to impact in various ways on the lives of citizens.

Keeping Hard-Earned Wealth within the Family: A False and Naïve "Modernity"

This is just an observation. My parents grew up in rural Malawi. They were fortunate enough, and indeed greatly aided by their hard work, to have attained an education and moved into the urban place as professionals in Geology and Sociology. I was twelve years old when my mother died and twenty when my father died. I am forever indebted to them for having been steadfast in raising my sister and myself in line with those very same values that they used to get to where they were.

My father always insisted that it was important to embody both the ability to function anywhere in the world, and that ability to function within your own country. He insisted that my sister and I were to learn and be fluent in Chichewa, the main language in Malawi. At the same time, he had us put in a school that only allowed the use of English during school hours. The result was him and our mother successfully raised two bilingual children. Other illustrations are how he insisted that we learned to walk to school (despite having the means to drive us back and forth), learned to hand-wash our own clothes (despite having washing machines and dryers), and to go outside to play and not be glued to the television and video-games. The icing on the cake came when he put me in a public school so that I could attain the Malawi Primary School Leaving Certificate. While there I learned that life was not all rosy in my country. I realized just how fortunate I was.

When my parents died. My sister and I had been left with the necessary ability to survive. All the skills they had bestowed upon us came to serve as assets for surviving in one of the poorest countries in the world. I don't know how we did it, but somehow, today, my sister is in Europe doing here Masters in Law, and I am here in South Africa pursing a Masters in Social Science.

The interesting thing is this; people work so hard to remove themselves from appalling situations only to refuse to train their children the same skills by which they were able to survive when they were coming up. And not always, but many times you see a family especially in this part of the world quickly lose everything it had worked so hard to achieve because the next generation was denied the skills and abilities to keep that hard-earned wealth within the family. Instead children are raised to be in denial of their surroundings, of their people, of their languages, of their governments, and of their countries. Somehow it is seen as "backward" for a child to associate with a life that is rampant and unavoidable in a country whose population is predominantly poor. What a truly naïve notion of "modernity". Or perhaps I am just biased to my own experience? But who cares?

Finding the handle on "things"

Well, "things" have indeed changed in Malawi since the demise of the last President, which paved the way for what promised to be a "new" kind of leadership. I personally followed events attentively to see if there was indeed a tangible hope amidst the emotional expectation that had beguiled our small nation. I am certainly a newcomer and, in many respects, an infant to this field of Malawian politics. I do not know many of the heroes that laid their very lives down for the sake of the promise that Malawi represented right away from colonial period and then the Kamuzu Banda dictatorship.

However, since the onset of our democracy, we have witnessed a kind of politics that instrumentalizes democracy rather than one that consists within it as an ideology. The way I see it, our democracy means oppressive legitimation, and the reading of the constitutional order that contracts all state functions within Malawi clearly shows how it is that totalitarian kinds of politics intend to use democracy as a pacifier of the people for short changing them and getting them to accept a less than palatable condition. This is indeed where politics, and not necessarily politicians, is supremely crafty in Malawi. Many citizens, if not most, will tell you that some"thing", one or another, or even a set of "things", make it impossible for us to even think of an ideal, and therefore, our democracy does the best it can within the state of "things". This is not to imply that fingers are not raised and pointed at wrongerdoers and saboteurs of our valued democracy. Rather, wrongdoers are merely greedy opportunities in a less than able system of politics. Illustrative of this point is the fact that democracy as it is provided for in the national constitution is well articulated and implemented in the Office of the President, and where the President's rights are invoked or threatened, eloquent men and women of the political parties to which the President belongs, have been quick to articulate precisely what it is that the president is entitled to under the prevailing constitutional arrangement. The provisions granted to the President's Office are very clear and well-elaborated within the practise of Malawian politics. They are however less defined in the practise of politics in the Judiciary and the National Assembly. They are even more remotely defined where they touch on the liberties and freedoms of the citizenry.

The powers of the president are very extensive, and are quite blatant especially in their defiance of our constitutional democracy. But recall - and as already implied above - that these powers are wrapped into a "benevolence and goodwill". The president wants good "things" for Malawi but is hampered by those who are sabotuers and ill-wishers, so the rhetoric goes. Malawian politics has craftily aligned and conflated these extensive powers and their abuses in an appealing morality that very ably paints an unknown villain in the mind of the collective even though that villain remains without a face - the villain is expressed in the crippled state of Malawian politics. The arrogance of the executive is therefore appaling but at the same time expected because in this one institution are housed the very best intentions that require just a little more power to make "things" right. The President must become more power to override the self-inflicting and crippling politics. If Malawi were a wealthier nation, the ideology would sell like the hot-cakes of fascism in Europe and  Consumerism in North America. The problem however is the hunger in the belly. Very soon, the circumstances confronting the people on the streets become the loudest critique against the political rhetoric embodied in the personage of the president and his political party. I think here is where we begin to see how it is that the circle-effect continues to hit Malawi. We seem to have a fetish for dictatorships. Some argue that the problem is only systemic, and an appraisal and re-visiting of the arrangement of government, through a constitutional review, could fix many of the problems. I would not entirely disagree with that observation except that the "accents" of constitutionalism are not carried along across time in a "silent, apolitical and apathetical" wording of law, but in the cultural manifestation of the actual practise of politics which also constitute the reading of that law. For illustrations, Bingu wa Mutharika was criticized and praised simultaneously for his arrogance between 2009 and when he died. The problem people had with him was not merely the experience of his deviance, but more especially the object to which is was being deviant to. The principle was not in "whether it was right or wrong for the president to speak to citizens in a particular tone" but what it was he was speaking about or against in that tone. It appears therefore that leadership is expected to maintain a tradition of expansive authority provided that the circumstances prevalent in society are conducive towards it. Humbly I concede that no single interpretation will stick, but this is how I have experienced the democratic dispensation of Malawi. As the adage goes, "the president is our father or mother." This adage epitomizes the benevolence mentioned already and the tendency to expand powers into ever increasing spheres of social and economic life.

In view of the above, perhaps the answer therefore lies not in a new president with a new idea. Sadly (*sarcastically), Malawi has on its memory the promise of a democracy - however it may be defined - and with it, any leadership model that is deterministic will ultimately fail. A fast-tracked development agenda is very likely to be supported by its beneficiaries and objected to by its victims, and the institution of the Courts will continue to grant citizens relief from encrouching executive decisions. I use the Courts here only as a metaphor to express how it is that the arrogance and defiance of a leader is at once expected and yet opposed. The system is therefore only potentially democratic even though its checks and balances (*metaphor again), as Americans like to call them, would be the very "things" that would cripple a heavily top-down/Father-Figure approach. The system would create quagmires, and ultimately lead up to public discontent with the person of the president, which would subsequently be followed by a "Malawi Spring" similar to July 20th, 2011. However, if we can begin to place the decision-making process directly in the hands of the people with the government's technical support, perhaps we will not need to very keenly develop a precise development agenda rooted in a father/mother-figure, rather than one that emanates from discursive processes that become legitimated by popular participation. This allows for a further articulation of constitutionalism in practice in other arms of government as well, like the National Assembly. And perhaps the stakes would be lower in the office of the president for both the president and the Malawian people. With that, maybe presidential overtures - the figure/mother-figure tendencies - would become less necessary. For now, I will leave it there. I did promise an article on how Malawi can go on to develop a model of development that is people-embedded. I do have the general sketches of that proposal in my mind, and some of it is mentioned above but I am not yet able to precisely articulate it until I have a firm handle on "things".

Lets hope these "things" all work out in the end.

The Missing Nation

Malawi has been independent now since the early 1960's, and yet somehow, when I meet people from different parts of the world, I usually have to explain to them that Malawi is that country with a lake, that is located between Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia. I then become rhetorical and begin to say things I do not personally believe in so as to quickly paint a pleasant picture of this great land that this person from another continent somehow missed. I slide into the obvious descriptions that depict Malawians as exceptionally warm and kind and loving. And then, when I discuss politics, I begin to describe an entirely different animal, one in which people cut other people's throats, tell blatant and fatal lies on the national broadcaster, and enrich themselves by embezzling public funds and entering into shady deals with multi-national corporations such as Mota-Engil, Group 5 and others.

Two issues emerge here, and perhaps more. One is that we love to call ourselves a peaceful people, and two is that despite our peace and warmth, we are notorious for corruption and fraud that has led to deaths, institutionally - as hospitals have not had drugs or working ambulances and even personnel; and brutally when police have shown up armed to the ends of their hair at public events such as protests. This dichotomy is intriguing. But more on this further down.

Public discourse has not helped Malawi's development of a nationalistic identity and agenda. I will use discourse in a watered-down fashion borrowed from the social sciences and it shall mean (in its watered down sense) the process through which society processes and develops eventual narratives that frame both the national view toward the plurality of the living and lived experience of a people (a national consciousness) as well as the basis upon which unspecified power can be unleashed without defaulting towards an analysis of say normative things such as the body of law, or the proper conduct of parliament. Basically discourse manifests as the knowledges in actual practise in society. This is crucial because discourse empowers and cripples national contracts. In Malawi, public discourse as an outcrop of the independence hysteria when Banda took over from the British and established the first presidency of independent Malawi. This hysteria did not materialize into a universal sense of oneness and freedom so much as it became a notion about who it was that freed Malawi and how they were then entitled to rule in a specific way having rendered that "priceless" service. The platform for a discourse for the use of power as well as a basis for authority was set. Throughout the years, way into the 80's and then the 90's Malawi continued to isolate the citizenry from the equation, and grew the presidency as equal to and even greater than the nation-state itself.

Notice should be paid to the fact that no constitution (pre or post referendum '93-94) vehemently spoke of these exaggerated rights of those who ruled, but discourse compelled the reading of the letter of the law in that direction. Come '94 and the ratification of a new constitution which had a very progressive bill of rights, and enter a new and extensively powerful Judiciary which the "right" to review any act or law for conformity to the new, democratic constitution of a reborn republic. The troubling question has always been, how have we continued to fail to tear down oppressive systems and modes of organization despite the many new grounds for contention afforded us by a new constitution. I shall not naively set aside issues of illiteracy and resources which unfortunately limit the extent to which citizens can prioritize human rights issues over sustenance issues. But even in the more affluent of our citizenry both educationally and economically, we find little evidence of agitation. The issue being, an internalized "knowledge" of what a citizen can or can not demand of their leadership is prevalent as a result of the long history under which public discourse was arrested and forced to take a certain direction and view of things. The issue is not so much about what is written in a social contract or constitution, rather it is really about how the Malawian Society can arrive to a place where the abstract notions of public service and citizen participation become disentangled from a form of thinking that eliminates certain possibilities before they even become an issue for public debate. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu have all suggested this notion of unthinking as emanating from the historical progression of the creation of knowledge and therefore standardizes practices with discourse determined accents. They implore society to critique their own processes of developing knowledge to see how discourse, rather than, call it, a natural progression of accumulation of knowledge, is responsible for the vivid, taken-for-granted, arrangements we now see in our modern societies. Nothing is natural, but society is prefigured on prevailing discourse which empowers and dis-empowers certain institutions, systems, agents and patterns of life, and thereby underpins the eventual look and feel of history. I will further state that rhetoric is vital for sustaining a nation, but the question is to have the right kind of rhetoric. In attempting to refrain sliding into another top-down deterministic political model we need to deliberately allow manageable conflict so that the sovereignty of the people of Malawi as they participate in political life freely becomes the legitimate stamp on our eventual discourse. And as long as discourse is free and open, we all have a chance to influence history and have a hold on it. Or at least to allow our various creations of evil and good to emanate from popular participation rather than the precedence that has dominated the past.

In arriving back to the issue that was raised, about a dichotomy, it becomes clear therefore how a warmhearted people can also be the sample from which ruthless, tyrannical leadership can be drawn. Warm-hearted people can expect tyranny from leadership as legitimate or as "expected". The outcry that blanketed Mutharika's presidency  from the public, mostly due to the crippled economy which made it hard for everyone to get by along with the human rights issues that were raised time and time again by the donor community and the civil society amidst their many fractures ushered in a different side to this discourse. And, all things considered, it is those exchanges that we hope will have brought about a new sense of empowerment and enablement amongst the citizenry that could curb excesses in the new presidency. Again, the matter is not about the letter of the law, but about the unthought processes that eventually constitute knowledge and standards at a later point in time ~ the discourses that will constitute political practises of Malawi at a later time.

My suggestion has been as follows, and I am not yet compelled to move from this position. We free discourse. We must deliberately nurture conflict so as to necessitate resolution (both conclusive and ongoing), and we must wake up to minorities and their rights for the simple reason that minorities and their "eccentricities" will cause the kind of confrontations we need to understand that their is not one Malawian view but several. Over and above this, we will free our discourse from the monotonous accent of how government and state are augmented to a pluralistic and self-reinventing accent. In doing so, we lock ourselves to the stern reality that the cost for not living in tolerance is likely more expensive than the cost for living in tolerance. This is will reflect in the formulation of more just and democratic institutions, greater individuality and creativity, and consequently a better system of government (which will have abandoned its patriarchal-father syndrome for one that is more embracing of diversity). Obviously, a reorganization of government is key to this process.

My next post will be to build a more concrete idea of how such a society could be jump-started and how certain reforms within government could be done so as to facilitate a dynamic re-conciliatory process which is also conducive for urgent development. I believe the answer lies in deliberately creating a government that cannot function without the continued and sustained endorsement of the citizenry via active, and even forced, discursivity. More on this shortly. Cheers

Nationalism

Disclaimer: I have only ever lived in Malawi though I have attempted to break beyond the barriers of boundaries by engaging with various writers' works. Any ethnocentric views are totally unintended even though in a broader sense, and as post-structuralist argue, there is no way to be in control over the meaning any text will eventually render.

Malawi remains a country that is hard-pressed on several fronts. The number of these fronts, in my humble opinion, rest mostly in a lack of a compelling idea that defines what it is our country values and wishes to achieve. This void obtains itself from a colonial background (though this excuse no longer appeals to me anymore) as well as a severe deficiency in the practise of our politics. Our politics in Malawi remain politics of exclusion, of division, of subjugation and of rewards and punishment. Our politics never allow any particular way of, call it, progressive thinking to materialize into a way of life or a culture so to speak. Definitions about anything that has transcendental value such as life, dignity, rights, freedom and other lofty ideas of a modern world remain in flux as they are only deployed in order to sustain and enhance powerful interests, and to dampen public conciousness by systematically creating groups of people with or without priviledges.

The argument then might be, would this not then denote a State that was intelligently deployed a propaganda that has moved people to respond as they currently do. I would say to that question that the secret lies in the overpowering wealth and institutional might resident with government as an organization to whom all people from various strata in society look for their daily bread be it in the millions or the cents. The government of Malawi continues to be the life-line for all manner of businesses both directly via tendering, as well as indirectly, via its spending. The private sector remains small which means it is unable to sustain itself with its own business networks. The private sector must remain small as well in order for government or shall we say State to remain strong. On the lower end reside the poor, whose main concern is food for today, for tomorrow and for next year. Rural and even urban life of the economically marginalized is characterized by the troubles of finding food as well as shelter (in the urban setting), and not necessarily with the naive view of food for today, but with the long term view of food for next year. Much of the formulae for finding food banks on the direct intervention of government.

Nationalism, in such an environment, is therefore a term that remains in flux. It only becomes action along the backdrop of political rhetoric so that power is consolidated. However, any government must remain in control regardless of whatever political regime it adheres to. This further denotes that the very integrity of a government requires a retention of power so that it can hold together over time. Add that inherent nature to a situation where life at every level is has a direct link with government and you quickly begin to envisage a society in which the national agenda is really an aggregation of individual needs that are not tied to an abstract overarching definition but to a very raw, very base translation of what a prosperous country should be. In our case, a prosperous country is a country whose government is able to meet the exact need that I am struggling with.

This is not to say that Malawians in general are a people who lack innovation. On the contrary, they are tireless and resilient in there efforts. However, there innovation, in my opinion, is primarily for survival in which case they do not see how their efforts come together alongside other people's efforts into a national agenda. Innovation is not linked to nation building. It is linked to survival, and then for those that do make it, success, and then reward. The reward of having made it in an extremely daunting environment. The national agenda is therefore deliberately made obscure in terms of popular participation so that the Ngwazi, the Savior, The God of Malawi, might be crowned as the only one who, through his superior intellect, has a handle on the extremely complex topic of nation building and unification. This manifests as empty rhetorical praise on Malawi Broadcasting Corporation, which by the way, has praised every government it has found itself under since its inception.

Politics in Malawi do not have the maturity to translate innovation in the public domain so that it becomes something that unities us. Politics in Malawi require divisions so that power can be maintained and enhanced. Even when a landslide victory is granted to a presidential candidate, they will run their office in such a way as to ensure that the landslide victory does not translate into a massive, unified vote of Malawians as a whole. But rather the specific interests of groups, ethnicities, regions, communities mandating an individual to rule for meeting their specific struggles. Malawi never speaks, therefore, together with one message. We speak as factions with different views of the same message. We speak as distinct interest groups from within the public. Country functions a collection of political parties so to speak, with everyone attempting to out-screw everyone else.

In recent weeks and months, I might argue that my theory might be proven right. We have seen a gross inability to think of human rights violations by the current government in a general way that is all inclusive. But rather our efforts turned into (a) lawyers demonstrating for the judiciary to be re-opened as it has threatened "their" right to economic activity (a human right), (b) CSOs organizing sit-ins for the unfortunate and deplorable torching of "their" colleagues houses by state agents, (c) Courts striking for "their" employment package amendments that were enacted by parliament as long ago as 2006, etc. All of which speak of a government that sees itself as not bond neither by any law nor any need to be accountable to citizens. At the end of the day, Malawi failed to realize that we were in fact all suffering from symptoms of that same ailment. And we each went on to fight our symptoms primarily from our own standpoints, and lost the war altogether as a nation.

In religion, particularly Christianity, which is one religion I feel competent to comment on, we see the over-personalization of Jesus as Lord and Saviour has espoused by the evangelical movement further destroy the sense of community and togetherness. In Jesus, people now look to their situation and their Savior and rarely beyond it, and develop the latent attitude that says, "as long as Jesus is watching over me, and providing for my needs, then I am alright" even if the police are outside shooting other citizens who are only fighting for the same aspirations that you pray to God for. We find ourselves with a Church that refuses to develop a theology that is Malawi specific, and devotes its energies to prescribing dresscodes for women and empowering people to be powerful but only as individuals. We find a church that never falls short of messages for Sundays and Saturdays but fails to formulate a stance on what is just and unjust in an ailing society. Again, government is present everywhere, and it is in the Church's interest to accord government its due respect lest it loses out its priviledges in the current arrangements. I will dare to say that Christianity as advanced by the mass tele-evangelists of the USA is an extension of capitalism and the recurrent themes of prosperity and success find their roots in the American dream, dating back to the founders and their formulation of that countries constitution. At best I can only say that their Christianity is based on a theology that is relevant to them, and perhaps not relevant to us nationally.

A lot has been said, and arguably a lot has been done, but at the end of the day, we see how as a society we have failed to recognize our struggle as universal. We have only conceptualized it as a bar to one's own progress in life. The void is that we have not yet come to see and think of ourselves as a nation. We are more like people who live within the boundaries of this geographical place called Malawi, in which are role is to develop our individual selves at whatever cost to the country we find ourselves in.