Distorted Foundations: Malawi Elections 2014

So its been a while since the last time I posted to this blog. And this has been for the simple reason that there has been a lot to take in, reflect upon and process. It has also been a rather interesting period because of the tension between my own emotional sensitivities and the objective victories of the democratic systems for which I often so fervently champion.

 

I must admit though that in recent months - within this period of silence - have lost considerable confidence in democracy particularly as a system for development. That being said, democracy at least allows me to state my disappointments with it or its implementation openly; firstly because it allows for even the dimmest opportunities for a citizen to see what is going wrong in high places, and secondly that even in its distorted implementation, it enables a certain level of depersonalization which allows for institutional reform. The latter is important because it is easier to reform systems than it is to reform despots. On the other extreme, there is the developmental authoritarian regime which, unless it were filled with the good spirits of Ghandi or Mandela or Dr King and others (you will notice that the list is easily exhausted), is largely incapable neither to implement development with any kind of real objectivity aside from personalizations which impede reform nor to provide adequate room for systemic reform. Unless you are the Chinese miracle, authoritarianism is often the supreme law of the dictator... it is a dictatorship which crystalizes into laws and cultures that foment and perpetrate it. And so since I have such little faith in human beings including myself, I guess I am relegated by default to the role of a pessimistic democrat at best.

 

In previous blogs I have often spoken about the corrupted "spirit" of public life which makes it almost impossible for even the most objective and clear of regulations, laws and stipulations to be seen in their neutral manner. I have rather pessimistically stated that any law or contract written down to facilitate any number of interactions will be seen in light of this "spirit" rather than for what that law is objectively; and consequently, reason becomes nothing more than the rhetorical instrument used to accomplish unreasonable ends. And this of course is what has implied my usual stubborn position that unless there be a revolution of leadership at the top which fundamentally alters the relations of power and the discourses that enable its deployment, there can be no real hope to rapidly transform our society into something positive for the majority. This is because within the realm of interests manifesting as rhetoricized reason, there is no limit to which newer forms of interpretations other than the reasonable one can be created and implemented in accordance with the prevailing corrupt spirit of that time.

 

Anyway, so recently the democratic institutions, namely the Courts of Malawi came through, firstly by blocking the attempted annulment of the elections by former President Joyce Banda, then tying the Malawi Electoral Commissions' (MEC) hands for a period of two to three days when they attempted to recount the vote in view of what they said were serious irregularities, and lastly by forcing the Malawi Electoral Commission to announce the electoral results which 7 of their 10 commissioners had refused to append their signatures to. This is bitter-sweet for me because on the one hand I was moved deeply to realize that our institutions had grown mature enough to arbitrate, and block off interferences, in a serious matter such as a national election. But on the other hand, I saw once more the typical style in which we do things in Malawi, where what is obvious is shrouded in rhetoric while what is less obvious is clarified in a chorus of technocratic verbiage. I will explain.

 

What compelled the Courts to order MEC to announce the results which MEC itself as an independent body has called flawed with "serious irregularities" was a clause somewhere in the electoral law that stated that results were to be announced within 8-days of casting the last vote. The Court stated that MEC had the full authority to do whatever it wanted to do in order to verify results (that is to ascertain their credibility) but this was to be done within the 8-days. I am no legal expert but it is clear to me that this law does not require MEC to announce fraudulent results. Secondly, that this law does not mean to say that casting a vote is one event, while announcing the victor of the vote is another because this would be tantamount to charging MEC with the authority to administer elections and then decide by some corrupt collusion that a winner was some candidate arbitrarily selected by the group of commissioners. Furthermore, since swearing in traditionally happens within twelve hours of the announcement of the result, there is no way the public would be able to contend that decision before the new president was sworn in. But of course, the entire judgment or ruling didn't consider any of these matters. Perhaps MEC should have taken a step further to say that the entire vote was a huge failure and that another one had to be conducted; this was probably their only way out since maintaining that a physical audit had to be undertaken implied that these "serious irregularities" were not serious enough to offset who the eventual winner would be. Nevertheless, every vote should count. Elections in Malawi are not the business of compiling aggregates but rather the serious matter of ensuring that even the lonely dissenter's vote is captured on the tally.

 

More so, ideally, and as a nation that has undergone systematic repression since 1891 through the British and then the Kamuzu Banda colonizations, you would expect a little less naivety on the part of our, as we have all seen, very powerful Judges. The law, as I understand it in Malawi, is written in a bottom-up manner, with some laws speaking more closely about the fundamental premises upon which our nation was created post-1994, and others speaking more about the regulations governing secondary and tertiary matters of public and institutional life. What I mean by this is simply that: where all authority to govern is held by citizens and conferred by the vote to elected custodians, there can be no law that prevents the occurrence of that first fundamental pillar. In a narrow sense, the 8-day law could not have been upheld by a Court of Law at the expense of a legitimate handing over of power by Malawi's sovereigns into the hands of a president. The question that should have been asked importantly was rather "how long would a reasonable extension be as requested by MEC". And interestingly, MEC would have had a proposal that could have been challenged by the counsel of those who opposed it. The Court would have heard both arguments and decided on what, under those unique circumstances, would be a reasonable extension. For me, this was a monumental occasion that was missed by our judiciary's commitment to pedantry.

 

In a country where the majority are poor largely by systematic design, the courts of Malawi need to see that the laws fundamentally are held to the foundational pillars of reconstruction and redistribution of economic, social and political resources to those citizens. This is implicit in the writing of our constitution which beyond just reciting the Bill of Rights goes further to stipulate in various provisions equally important developmental rights in direct response to periods prior to democratic Malawi in 1994. As such, the law must be a living and breathing set of standards that ears and sees the condition of the people. The law cannot be read and interpreted with the attitude of finality, but rather in the attitude of continuous reconstruction and rebuilding; and this is the monumental task that was bestowed upon our very powerful Judiciary (recall also that the judiciary has the power to review any decision or action - not just legal - that is made by the executive for conformity to the Malawi constitution... need I say more?). But of course, so many other things that we developed well-meaningly in Malawi have now become a painful thorn in the side of their intended beneficiaries. In the end, nobody wins - rather, we all lose together as we adhere to continuously distorting our otherwise good foundations.

 

Nevertheless... Congratulations to my dear 5th President of Malawi... Professor Arthur Peter Mutharika... May this be the beginning of better days.

Revolution or Pragmatism from a Modest Malawian View Point

This essay will touch of several separate topics. The aim will be more to show how nuances of various topics have a role to play within the broader and tumultuous realm of politics. At this point in my life, I am convinced that we all are involved in politics, even when we have said to ourselves that we are apolitical, and this position is what currently drives me towards the conclusions I often make.

 

Revolution is a powerful word which captures the process of achieving the idealisms of the various groupings and factions that play their part in the dense political sphere. The dominant canons or discourses around which the definitional essence of that word are derived are embedded at least in the contemporary setting in a Marxian sense albeit no always within the Marxian conclusions. That sense is that revolutions entail that moment in which there is the realization of a critical mass of some awareness whose content manifests in a focused overthrow of an undesirable status quo. However, beyond the massive manifestation of that awareness' content upon the status quo is an undefined utopian space in which the shattered and yet remnant symbolisms of the previous order are arbitrarily designated into unequivocal, incoherent and generally unsystematic definitions about what a utopian existence actually should look like. This existentialist vacuum is in my interpretation what necessitates the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Marxist intellectual chapters, as well as an inherent intra-social resistances within the matrix of social actors generally towards revolution. More correctly, revolution isn't the object of disdain in and of itself - rather the lack of definitional exactness with regards to singular subjects following the overthrow of a status quo is.

 

An automatic solution therefore to this problem is a benevolent dictatorship or the dictatorship of Fidel Castro or more exactly, the dictatorship ascribed by a consenting proletariat. A dictatorship that is somehow geared towards total emancipation upwards even to the level of aesthetics, while maintaining a strong reformist position towards what are admittedly, even in Marxist and Hegelian doctrine themselves, the fundamental roots of all epiphenomenal human existence including aesthetics. This is after all the very reason why there is a lengthy and hostile critic of ideology within those same writings in which ideology is the manifest pacifier of endemic economic arrangements. Nonetheless, the imposition of a dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise, remains nothing more than an balancing stone to a very complicated question, and that question is, after the revolution that involves hundreds of thousands of people, from where then shall we draw a definition from which a utopian existence could be designed and implemented. This is precisely where Africa as a continent finds itself. Unlike its sister continents who through the processes of intentional but still nonetheless organic development (and I don't not say development to mean progress) have through the passing of time arrived at varying crystalized definitions of what life on those continents is about, and subsequently approximations of what is worth preserving. In Africa, the dilemma is ominous because the revolution is said to have already happened at independence; a revolution of political independence and self-determinism which however, within the very same decades of self-rule, had become subservient to the broader concerns of limiting economic circumstances. Or, to put it differently, circumstances that warranted self-rule in conjunction with continued economic dependence. This is of course for the simple reason that after independence was gained, the remnant symbolisms of State-ism and capitalism (or communism as its fierce opponent) had translated the revolutionary language pre-independence into ideals only realizable or imaginable within the precincts of the language or discourse of State-ism itself. It was either that as stepping stone for the political sustainability of the definitional dictatorships or the abyss of "the lack of utopian definitions".

 

Residually,  therefore the constitution of power which was required to reform or revolve that African condition remained in tact because of the absence of definitional exactness. In turn, this translated into a strange commitment to dictatorships even when the economic might of the State was clearly not within the control of the dictator per se but in the arm of the donating colonial-mother. The African revolution therefore in a practical terms was a vision whose viability was defined externally, but experienced and suffered internally - and to this effect, entirely experienced in a continuous juxtaposition with an abhorred and yet desired other. The definition granting powers of African executive branches defined only the modalities for maintaining the rights to twist and spin African definitions within an already prevailing language of dependence and its subsequent longings, while their true abilities to transform tangibly the lives of those they claimed those definitions were for was housed in London, or New York, or Berlin or other far flung places of African Longing. This tension, I claim in this essay, is visible today. But I also make another claim that may startle those who are often too militant about apportioning blame upon imperialism; that African dysfunction within such an arrangement is collegially of our own making.

 

I proceed as follows; even within the discourse of revolution, our continent's thinkers and politicians tussle over redistributing wealth, expanding services so as to engender socio-economic development, and other reforms that would materially - that is in terms of global/western definitions of wellness - improve the standing of African people. Revolution is thus laced everywhere within prevailing global definitions of wellness or betterment. There is also for example the naïve taking for granted of self-evident qualities and conditions that would universally speak to all of humanities desires and aspirations which are also fundamental universal doctrines about humanity which are western. They are the same self-evident criteria that are for example used to justify international acts of aggression and war. Now, the point is not to push for an alternative because clearly even if such an alternative could be produced, the argument I have presented so far attests to precisely the opposite of such an alternative. It seems clear that within our own dysfunctional marauding we are in fact all aspiring to - due to the historical outputs of our, call them, earlier induced or otherwise dispositions at independence and before - approximations towards the Western ideal anyway. And this is unsurprising because the Utopia, arrested by economic limitations, enabled by benevolent developed states whose acts of donation animate with life the wills of our political actors on our continent and our overall projects, are themselves imaginably the ideal. In this case they are donating as ideals, or financing the realization of an approved ideal. For we all know that violated ideals lead to aid cuts which often collapse political definitional powers eg. Malawi.

 

I find therefore that within that mess, arguments pertaining to what is essentially human in its origin or what is imbued as a consequence of an imposing other may be important to some, but my outlook is typically more modest. Firstly, we have a utopian desire that cannot be defined in any manner that could render it as a universal concept that reflected all aspirations. Our historical experience itself denies this. The utopian definitional vacuum only necessitates the need for a balancing benevolent dictatorship which masquerades as benevolent precisely because it sits in the vacuum of the absence of a definition. And lastly, we have the status quo rampant with currents of discontent and suffering, opulence and luxury, all of which a defined presently in various but nonetheless owned or conscious approximation towards western standards or antagonisms against those same western standards. Our own experience thus seems to force us to see the West as the only viable, resented or loved, alternative in the context in which a revolutionary future presents only a utopia with a void existentialist definition. So I ask, what then is the viable basis for any revolution anyway if its eventually is precisely the antithesis of the very aesthetic freedoms - or languages - we as Africans seek to protect; definitions which are blanketed in African rhetoric about a lost glory in a Western vocabulary.

 

I have many times before stated that such questions shouldn't have to matter at all if indeed we - and as our historical record has shown - have defined ourselves presently within the very things we claim to hate. Of what use therefore is this perpetual commitment to towards revolution when, even at this present time a pragmatic programmatic would be sufficient to heal the wounds of the unjustly suffering who predominantly already identify their betterment in terms of a Western vocabulary? The self-made aspect of our African problems have therefore more do with our own reluctance to see our circumstances for what they are, to be honest about the languages in which we speak or articulate them, and to move decisively to absolve them within a set of terms that are already present and rampant within the prevailing order - terms that are unfortunately western such as the State itself or even Citizenship. Visions about paradise are great, but Africa must come to terms with the reality that we are limited by what we can actually do. And that limited space of what we can do is much more fulfilling for all of us than what has been the case so far since independence in this longing for a utopia that we only know as a paradise but cant define in any tangibly existential manner.

 

The language that systems that function objectively within our own borders; that do not shield malpractice and offenders; and that attempt to symmetrically treat all citizens of States on the singular basis of their citizenships indeed echoes calls for a modernization of Africa. But we ourselves can begin to find the additional merits and demerits arising out of our own commitments to actualize a system of State to its very logical conclusions in manner that would permit us to transcend the western nostalgia, and arrive towards a cultural dictum that would define our own experiences. This would liberate us from this perpetual juxtapositional existence of always snaking around the central monolithic ideal in our ambivalent love for and hate of the West. The dysfunction brought about by high political powers designated to act as revolutionary prophets - or the quest for subsequent prophets following the pursuit of a new utopia - without the means to express their visions in economic terms and let alone in any fair terms always leave nations open to the appetites of those central personalities of power. Subsequently positions Africans to see the West as the ideal. Internal cohesion is therefore the first step towards any kind of decolonization effort. Revolution for me remains nothing but a revolutionary idea. What we need is Pragmatism - within the already rampant discourses, which follows into an honest realization of where we are, accounts for how we see ourselves there, and what practical affordances and limitations we face to better ourselves within those already rampant concepts.

 

 

The Simplicity of Greatness: A down to earth view of Mandela

Very little can be taken away from Mandela in terms of what he managed to achieve for his great country, and the ripples that swept various parts of our continent and indeed our world as a result of those achievements. At face value, the ideals for which Mandela stood - and was prepared to die for - did raise a few hairs on some backs particularly because of their implications as regards leadership on this continent and beyond. But a deeper view into Mandela's ideals reveals perhaps the workings of one of the most prudent political minds we have yet seen on our continent.

I think Mandela keenly understood the human condition, and firmly believed that the majority of human suffering was a direct consequence of mostly selfish and self-serving human actions. In respect of that realization, Mandela sought out to make the most of what such an unenviable condition could conjure up if only it were political configured in specific ways for its own internal egocentricities to consolidate into a form of cooperation and co-existence.

Of all the fights for self-rule on the African continent, no designated group of Africans ever cooperated with each other in order to inherit a bigger and wealthier economy than that of South Africa. And by extension, the shear promise of being in charge of such an monument of an economy naturally shifted that economy into a center of focus for the various racially differentiated factions of the South African "nation". In this regard, while the calls for nationalization and indigenization rang louder as their fore-running calls of Ujama and African communism declined, they did not dissuade Mandela into heeding them. For him, the bare pragmatics of the long awaited transition into self-rule that his organization alongside the many others who have today been overpowered by the ANC's liberation rhetoric, required the careful preservation of the common center of stakes which was the economy, tinged with the gradual and cautious transition that would enable Africans to slowly filter into its ranks. The logic for this move was simple: radical transformation would only be sustainable in the short and barely into the medium terms precisely because a destroyed economy which had become the focus and aspiration of the previously oppressed would only become a catalyst for rogue centers of power each of them committed to their own ambitions. But implement a gradual transition, then all you have to deal with are the on-going cries of those who felt the transition was moving too slow while the economy itself cushioned and soaked up some of the discontent as more and more people were absorbed into it. This is why for me, as much as many people cry foul about Mandela's handling of South Africa's transition, I think that their ability to cry and to feel like they have been heard has lot to do with the fact that South Africa is what it is today rather than what it would have been if there had been a radical shift at "independence". And to add more flesh to this argument, there is still not yet an African president who inherited a country at independence and didn't treat its inherited economy as a sacred-cow. Kamuzu Banda of Malawi did it, Mugabe did it (up until he became radical), Dos Santos did it, Kaunda did it and several others - albeit within the constraints of that characterized their times. The overt difference therefore between Mandela's transition and the transitions of others was simply this: while other African countries aspired for self-rule with less of an impression of the economies they would inherit because they were significantly smaller, South Africa's much larger economy made a deeper impression of the gains to be realized upon the realization of self-rule. And by default, the economy was the battlefield which Mandela, in his political shrewdness, quickly moved to de-militarize.

Now the questions that need to be asked within such a scenario can only be about the practicalities of implementing the vision of the South Africa so many seek to see while accepting the centrality of South Africa's economy in that entire process. After all, there is nothing else that, even within the vague definition of Africanness, acts as a distinguish-er between "Africans" as a whole and "South Africans" as a specific group of Africans other than the economic difference between other African countries and that of South Africa. And this is not to mention the place such an economy accords South Africa globally. Now, if the economy of South Africa is so central to the extent that it has demarcated and instilled African identity itself into two blocs namely "South Africans" and "Africans", what kind of a man would realistically implode such an economy upon which the very warring and radical factions themselves based their radical ideas? For me, Mandela saw an imperfect but prudent resolution to an enormous dilemma, and opted for it. He would preserve the economy, and champion a painstaking slow process of integration that would span several decades, fully aware that that very thing everyone was very radical about was the sole entity that gave a nation rising out of decades of conflict and violence any chance at cohesiveness and perhaps a shot at unity. And furthermore, if democracy would remain the aspired-for ideal, then radicalism could not be an option. The process therefore of building a nation sat squarely on creating the impression that given the de-racialized and objective systems that would come with democracy, the country then emerge de-personalized and as such united in a seemingly disembodied and automated economy... an economy that seemed to represent everyone and no one in particular with the grand effect of instituting a formative or an embryonic state of unity essential for holding the entire contraption, if you please, together.

But then a surface examination of such a prudent choice would point us to what remains the dominant criticism of Mandela which is that he was too good to the oppressor at the expense of his own people. There is always a certain level of substance in every argument but I am not so inclined to take such a criticism wholesale, because like I have argued above... South Africa's economy is its identity, as in a great sense the focus of its struggle, and today remains its basis of difference from the rest of the continent. It was therefore within the parameters of that economy that human dignity had been lost under the evils of racism. And as such, dignity would be restored largely through re-integration into it. Perhaps this is why the economy is concurrently resented and loved by its citizens on the basis of its exclusion and its rewards respectively. Radically tampering with it would no doubt have created a different South Africa. I am just not sure if that alternative version would have yielded greater levels of hope than we see presently.

But in a few weeks or months, who knows. I might be compelled to think differently about this entire topic. Sometime next week, I hope to post an argument about Revolution within the African context. I will pre-empt the following: I don't think that such a concept exists in the real world outside the realm of ideals.

The Inverse Relationship Between Patronage and Political Power

Last month I wrote a polemic in which I argued that the only way Malawi is to rise out of its debilitating state is to channel its antagonistic energies motivated by greed into a grand nation building formula. The arguments can be seen in that previous post entitled Reconciling Our Problematic Concepts.

This week, we have seen the president of Malawi heighten her efforts to consolidate power via the old formula of patronage. And this is an interesting one because as already demonstrated in previous posts, patronage is an inherently insufficient strategy to achieve the consolidation of power precisely because insatiable greed is the motivation at the core of most of Malawian business. The State which is heavily donor dependent has no means in and of itself to sustain that heavy weight of patronage and therefore, the more people the president calls up into her bloated team of patrons, the less resources are available to appease the vast majorities who are outside her circle to sustain the very power she craves. In the last instance, Malawi will revert to the same situation that undid Kamuzu, undid Muluzi, and was undoing Bingu. That situation occurs when the country becomes so polarized along the lines of “those within the gravy train” and “those outside it”. This formula simply does not work.

The only way to silence a country saturated by greed in the absence of a heavily greased military is to level the playing field, make transparent the business of the State, and effectively give people no reason to think that some are being offered more without merit than others. That simple formula automatically galvanizes two sets of activities;

Firstly, it raises the collective consciousness to a level at which there is an obsession with protecting the just order because only through that order can the greed of others be curbed. In this fashion we use the very venom of our greed to police ourselves into a just and fair order.

Secondly, it raises the agency level of the citizens because when everything is transparent, activities engaged by various actors are more ascertained, less risky and therefore more profitable to the greed motivator that induces those activities in the first place. Economists have expanded this basic Social Theory to generate the vast field of study Economics is today, looking at means and ends, demand and supply within a context of insatiable appetites and limited and contested resources. With less speculation, there is an automatic adherence to the status quo which in economics theory is called the equilibrium: there is no inherent tendency to want to alter it.

These two simple pillars would be the foundation of building a new Malawi.

Rhetoric about God and justice, good governance, and other ideals which do nothing to symmetrize the greed machine via the imposition of an institutional order that is everywhere symmetrically experienced by the citizenry will not take the country anywhere. They will only serve to continue to create ideological bases from which various forms of injustice can be accounted for as normal and acceptable. For instance, to fear God is to fear the leadership he ordains (check your Bible, or if you are like me, borrow one and check). Another for instance: to respect your elders is to be morally right in the numerous cultural forms of the Malawian nation. Usually the elder in this case is the president, our Amayi or Mother. In the end, these two randomly selected edifices only provide a basis for why citizens who feel cut off from or marginalized by the State should keep quiet and trust the God-given leader or respect the Mother of the Nation who knows exactly what she is doing. This is why, in my view, a State based on secular ideals is for me the best kind of State. It is realistic in the sense that it holds no ideals or sentimentalism higher than any others, it accepts the human condition for its rotten state, and seeks to institute regulations that must apply to everyone regardless of whether they worship Mbona, Allah, Jehovah or whoever they so please to.

So in returning to the crux of this topic, as the desperation grows within the party of the President, we must expect to see bigger and bigger webs of patronage which will be coupled by greater financial mismanagement, and ultimately a weakening ability of the State to render its core functions. As the State collapses in its abilities, we will see greater efforts to expand the patronage in order to consolidate power, which will go on to further weaken the State’s abilities. Ultimately, we will see a loss of power just as we have seen it in the past, and….and here is the thing; another one who promises a new future for Malawi will arise to whom we will all rally only to be taken back into the same cycle again. The principle is clear, a poor country cannot sustain any government on the basis of patronage. It can only do so by institution a form of indifference that makes everyone feel that they are equal to everyone else in terms of its regulations, its opportunities or whatever citizen affordances it bears on its written code.

The answer to our problem is thus staring us in the face. Patronage does not maintain power especially in a country whose development budget is almost completely donor financed. Malawi’s revenue is only barely able to keep up with its recurrent costs of salaries (inclusive of the luxurious living in high government) and operations in the state service. Development financing however is almost entirely sourced externally; that is the 40 per cent of the budget that is donor funded constitutes over 80 per cent of development expenditure, while the 60 per cent is predominantly recurrent State costs, such as State Houses and Allowances, and salaries. So Malawian taxes only barely cater for our recurrent budget, while roads, hospitals, schools and other assets that require capital investment are externally financed. Such is the enormity of our herculean crisis.

But we can trust Joyce Banda to follow the failed script to the bitter end whence from she too could meet her political demise. We just hope that that end will not take the entire nation along with her as seemed to be the aspirations of her predecessor, one Bingu wa Mutharika.

Reconciling our Problematic Concepts of Sovereignty, Nationalism and Culture within a context of Dependency

The title of this article is broad, and the questions that could ensue from a more comprehensive interrogation of the concepts named in that title could lead to lengthy discussions with little relevance to the immediate needs of troubled Malawi. As such, this article will attempt to make concise and direct linkages between the seemingly abstract aspects of the concepts involved with pragmatic outputs which necessitate collective political action.

Firstly, let me place the assumptions undergirding much of my thinking in the open. Paradoxically I consider myself an optimistic-pessimist, and what I mean by that is this - I do not think it is of much use to presuppose that any human being in most cases would opt to work selflessly in the interest of the collective when the opportunities to do the contrary are readily available. My proposal are thus informed by this rather cynical view, and often I attempt to find synergies within our rotten systems that ultimately synchronize the egocentric and self-centred actors of that system into complementary counterparts for positive change. If done right, I am convinced that the newly emergent stakes arising from a re-ordered social setup would motivate the inherent greed in humanity to protect against a compromise of that system which could potentially undermine the welfare of themselves as a collective - even though that itself would be motivated by an entirely self-centred attitude to preserve self and only just self. By being so modest, it means that my predications for a better society can only ever be understated, and that anything beyond the very basic expectations would be very great news.

Malawi, needless to say, groans with the hunger to be sovereign. The definitions of sovereignty abound, masquerading within the disambiguating terms of self-determination, self-reliance, self-validation, and even for the more liberal thinkers, greater global relevance. In a crude manner, sovereignty seems to be subtly presented as the grand eventuality of nationalistic pride emanating from the acquisition of a largely collective realization of a distinct civilization that accords members of that national society the right to be ethnocentrically arrogant. An arrogance emanating from a well-developed collective psyche rooted in self-validation, self-determinism, and global visibility.

Nationalism would thus entail not just the camaraderie that comes to envelope the members of the society in question, transforming them into a community of brothers and sisters who also inseminate each other while inviting external others to participate in the greatness of their communal life, but more critically the mutual cooperation in the protection of that which is considered central to the holding up of that particularly adored society. While there can be no consensus as to what fundamental pillars these protected social artefacts really are – even though the modalities through which material and to some extent immaterial needs are met within that society would constitute some of those central features – the various spheres at which individual members of that society find their stake and access into the material and immaterial opportunities of that society become the egocentric motivators for protecting and reinforcing the status quo. In which case, greed and self-centeredness within the right kind of societal setup would propel to varying extents fairness and justness – but not on account of a strong belief in that principle, but rather on account of the strong stake in the sphere from which one’s limited livelihood is drawn from and sustained. To that effect, a rewired society whose systemic tentacles extended deep into the many spheres and spaces from which various members obtained sustenance should, even against the very design of its members, accommodate symmetrical applications of procedures and stipulations that would necessarily benefit the whole. Indeed within this abstraction resonate the problem of change – that is the ability of a society to pragmatically deal with the changing circumstances under which it finds itself over the course of time. This problem is perhaps too large to be contested on this blog, and suffice it to say that it may be tackled to the best of my abilities in later posts. But, if the rewired society is sufficiently self-preservationist, then pragmatism propelled by that same essentially egocentric individualism should activate sufficient quantities of the social system to induce change.

And as such, the role of culture – another very problematic concept to even define let alone incorporate into developmental efforts – would become devolved into localities in which culture would be informed not by the ancestors so much as it would be informed by necessity; a necessity everywhere cognizant of the strict limitations that undergird the liberties that everyone symmetrically enjoys. To that end, the ordinary expectation of sovereign and nationalist arrogance is not intentionally an attitude towards others, but rather a focused and coordinated effort to preserve that which enables people to live similar to one another, and yet independent of one another – truncated inextricably into a binding nationalism obtained from an assuring set of societal stipulations and organizations which ultimately make the said people a proud sovereign.

Then comes the discussion having to do with the harnessing of greed into a system that transforms it into an energy for progress. The answers would obviously vary from place to place – or to put it more accurately from country to country. But in as far as Malawi goes my proposal is somewhat modest that, and even with the litany of a growing number of political actors, a political resolution is more than likely the most eminent origin. The greed engine continues to churn in Malawi and yet within a context of ever growing stakeholders to the political processes compounded by their increasing power to unsettle and potentially dethrone establishments, the greed of populism itself which in Malawi’s history has fed patronage and state-clientelism would attempt to prolong its place on the Malawian political scene by instituting adaptations to the system that promise a fairer share of the national pie, including power, to the litany of political actors. That is the first foreseeable automated positive outcome of greed. And through a set of unpredictable and greed-informed steps, the minor reforms should lead to other reforms with the impact of limiting the political space in the arenas of the elite while concurrently widening the space of the previously marginalized. Greed would do this in order to ascertain its own place within the societal setup. Indeed focused efforts will churn on in the back-and-foregrounds in the spheres of civil society and other non-state actors which would contribute to spurring on this one-dimensional progression of our society – I however refrain from declaring that even such humanitarian acts would truly be motivated by the need to serve others. My assumption is that while there are some people who do care about others, most of us do not – and so we must bank upon this parasite and pathological human condition to somehow work itself into a situation that enables more and more people who do not care to be accommodated into this new form of social organization which cares for all of us precisely because we do not and will not care.

The question of dependency – the seemingly perpetual affliction of financial self-insufficiency – works most powerfully within a context in which the very benchmarks whereupon a people can judge for themselves the progress made in their country are lacking. Depending on others for financial reasons could be the result of good and convincing reasons, and perhaps – even though the evidence is narrow – help put a country in a position to catapult itself onto a better and more sustainable trajectory. But while economic or financial dependency has numerous criticisms which have been extensively discussed by various political economists and economists alike, the social effects of dependency in as far as the national psyche is concerned in the absence of internal benchmarks means that a nation remains always divided as to the exact role that external financiers ought to play. And this is not to the very simplistic and narrow definitional connotations of what the previous statement reads, but more deeply in the spheres of livelihood which are largely sustained not by a wide and everywhere symmetric system but rather by patronage, exclusion and to put it simply “GREED”. In a consistent manner as applied to the earlier view, the wells from which one’s water is harvested and from which one’s bread is drawn directly inform discourse disguised as an objective plea to maintain, reform or scrap a particular arrangement which is yet only informed by the egocentric desire to protect one’s well. Thus, should the assertions mentioned above indeed culminate into a greed informed state of progress, dependency as the epiphenomenal outshoot of internal instability within a fierce contest of ensuring the preservation of livelihoods naturally loses its destabilizing impact and becomes a stench to the inhabitants of the particular social order whose maturity has allowed it a greater degree of self-reliance and global-significance. Dependency then comes to be seen as an warranted access into the cultural independence of that social organization which must be resisted and blocked – as seen in South Africa for instance even though its complexities are very unique from those of Malawi.

In essence therefore, the problematic concepts of sovereignty, nationalism, culture and aid dependency appear to me as the occasions under which ordinarily compatible concepts are misaligned by a missing and symmetrical stake that causes or accrues into a collective adherence. I do not see too many contradictions within the concepts themselves so much as I see contradictions within the mode of business as it is in the motherland and how these concepts fail to be appropriated into that largely undefined context. After all, while indeed the actions that surround such concepts are varied and versatile, the concepts themselves fix actions as loaded activities aimed at enforcing the more or less static implications of those concepts. And as such, those static features are what allow the greed-informed progress which conjures up a system as a popular stake to more stability adhere to the static expectations of such concepts. Even within this pessimistic view, should a political leader decide to fast track the processes leading up to such an eventuality, it would not offset the expected compatibility to these concepts and self-protecting features that would allow them to remain stable and yet attentive to environmental shocks – whatever they might be, social, political, economic or ecological – affecting the said society. As such, I remain optimistic within this pessimism that ours remains a country steadily primed to rise and become great.