Malawi's Extraordinary Ambivalence

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about this year is that it is not business as usual in Malawi anymore. In previous blogs I have argued, with some difficulty, about social currents or transcripts, about the unwritten text that configures social currents albeit sometimes just beneath the level of our consciousness, and especially the enormous dilemmas of not necessarily extracting ourselves from our problems but rather causing them to churn in the direction of progress. Progress itself, I also argued, was to be defined in the strict terms of pragmatism in which all objects of our heavily proliferated and transcendent culture become relativized to the point where they become nothing more than tools to an end.

Now in 2013, it appears that the transcripts that underlie social interactions in Malawi have somewhat began to broaden beyond their initial parameters. The official performances of what characterize daily politics in Malawi have become old and tired. The Government of Malawi has maintained its grip on development via its heavily centralized organization. As a consequence, the public has started to demand that development directly from the centralized government, and as speculated in recent posts, while the government has suddenly though predictably found itself unable to meet out all the demands emanating from everywhere amongst the Malawian public. This is fracture number one - where the old politics of patrimonialism have folded upon themselves due to the declining space between central governments and district publics, to call them that. This shrinkage, much like globalization, has been necessitated by the availability of information technologies that are allowing people to keep abreast with the functionings of their government. Yes some of these technologies are as old as the radio itself. This modern effect was grossly underestimated by Bingu who was aware of it, and I know this, because he frequently used the public broadcaster to spread his propaganda so as to shape public opinion (not the newest trick in the book, perhaps even the oldest and most tired). But Joyce Banda has simply, as far as her behavior entails, either not considered it, or has supposed that it would work in her favor (as evidenced by her willingness to issue out more broadcasting licences to new media houses). In a nutshell, a government that seeks to be praised for everything good within its borders inadvertently invites criticism for everything bad as well. This is why a de-centralization of power is more politically prudent even for the most power hungry politicians in the World. Unless of course you are not Malawi, and you have a large and devoted enough military following to suppress any dissent associated with everything bad.

The nature of Malawi's ambivalence is extraordinary indeed (pardon my rather long introduction). The excessive centralization of power has had the following effect, amongst many, in the way citizens and central government interact. In the first place, all good things (metaphorically speaking) come from the president, the parent of the nation, who is wisest and most powerful. Secondly, in spite of all that power and wisdom, not everyone receives good things from the president except those who are close to him or her (because the president will reward his or her children depending on the value of their work that is culturally, while perhaps the real reason for this is that the president simply does not have enough resources at the disposal of his or her government to meet everyone’s need). And lastly, there are so many of us who have seen all four presidents of Malawi - three of them already having come and gone – and have not yet received any favors. Furthermore, the limited resources of the Malawi government have become all the more apparent now than ever before because firstly, the dramatic expulsion of the British envoy has firmly, maybe unfairly, been imprinted on everybody as the root cause of the current economic woes, and secondly, the more recent campaign efforts of Joyce Banda who goes around telling people that Malawi needs the assistance of British government, the World Bank and the IMF even citing them as the authority upon which she is assured that her reforms will work, further diminishes the power of her own government. Here, we can already see an impractical and self-conflicting discourse - it says I am the President your God in the same breath as it says I am not all powerful and all capable. Perhaps the globetrotting seeks to push a somewhat different message that says, “I am your President, the special one, who is able to convince the sophisticated west into assisting our country... and therefore I am something beyond the ordinary.”

Now, in examining the public sphere or space, you also begin to see this same impractical and self-invalidating principle. The performances of power such as motorcades, military escorts, red carpets, external visits, massive entourages and the works all serve to cause faith in the Presidents abilities to meet needs. These are indeed expected by many people who go to see the President. They expect this portrayal of power and general extravagance. And yet, because this power has remained more or less accessible to the few, amidst the growing knowledge that it is all in fact a hoax and that the president's government doesn’t even have funds to keep itself running, causes a despair and yearning for something different, something more. However, beyond the confines of the pre-texting transcript of social and political life, that something more remains at most only vaguely defined, and at worst, only seen as an idea or concept of a better life. Its like a need felt by the citizen to somehow move beyond this crippling state of affairs. It would not, in my opinion, be wrong to presuppose this because where a state is heavily corrupt and therefore arbitrary in its allocation of "benefits", a great deal of suspicion ensues and not just suspicion towards the State, but to the Malawian public generally. It is not uncommon to find Malawians complain about corruption in public, but during those encounters, those involved in the dialogue are without corruption while everybody else who constitutes the generalized public is deemed corrupt. To put it comically, there might have been an instance in which every adult Malawian in Malawi could have been complaining to another adult about corruption with this generalized picture of the otherness of corruption within the broader society. In which case, everyone was at that moment un-corrupt while everyone else was corrupt (see what I mean?)  This is a case of at least three impractical and self-conflicting logics (the Presidential one, the public-government one, and lastly, the individual-public one). The social transcript as it is is not able to fully encompass this, call it, problem. It seems the public space is fresh for newer and more relevant discourse.

The intricate and meta-theoretic details of this strange position can be seen within the writings of Cultural Sociologists. I for one do not fully espouse their positions but I feel that this filter called culture produces the sorts of subjectivities that could explain a lot of some of the more self-conflicting happenings in Malawi even though the exact motivating causes of such might in fact emanate from the felt living conditions of that country's people. In a nutshell, this extraordinary ambivalence is a good thing for this reason; the political stage and its associated performances will have to be changed. And since we are in a crisis state of economy, it is unlikely that any larger than life projections of the presidency or of upper government generally will fly with the people. That line of performance no longer sits well because we are now all too aware of our government’s limitations. The presidency has only the option of diminishing and presenting an image that is more in tandem with the conditions of the people. As a consequence, institutions will be strengthened because larger than life figures of personalities will not be tolerated by the public. The arrested or limited transcript of the social as it now stands means the debate or the opinions in the public stage might be minimal, but the resistance will be strong. These last sentences I made are highly optimistic and need to be further fortified with some more rigorous examination. That should lead me to my next blog post in the next several days.

Let’s see how this all pans out in 2013.