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