Rantings about Malawi: Who we are

Malawi is truly a Post-Colony, and this is not merely because colonization was a real event of our history. I often like to listen attentively to what various experts and pundits have to say in their diagnostics of our Great Republic, and then I also like to listen to conversations amongst our other various groups who are never heard widely through our media outlets. In these conversations, there are numerous overlaps amongst the themes, but the eventual proposals of action are quite dissimilar. In the final instance, the difference in opinion amongst various experts, pundits and all other groups can be classified as follows: expert opinions are the result of (western) education with occasional tinges of Afrocentricism here and there, pundit opinions are broadly the views of an overburdened (professional) middle-class informed by the reader-, listener- and viewerships of newspapers, radios and television, while the other opinions are of the uneducated masses who supposedly don’t know what’s good for them. Conspicuously missing are the views of big business leaders because these tend to be disembodied through the institutional voices of say National Bank, or Press and other such large corporations without any real human face.

This is broadly how our society tends to classify opinions, and this is a typical hallmark of a post-colony: a society in which natives differentiate themselves into artificial groups through which violence (symbolic, systemic and physical) is appropriated, and suffering is legitimated. The veil beneath which violence in the post-colony hides itself is in how various groups respond practically to the real situations that confront them without a broader view of how their actions contribute towards the ongoing decay in the wider social setting. The postcolony is thus an association of seemingly disaffiliated groups conjoined in what appear to be isolated activities which nonetheless amalgamate into their collective decline.

In my humble view nonetheless – and indeed it is humble because this is a rather complicated issue – most discourse in Malawi is generated out of a general tension between two broad fronts which are the views of the experts/pundits on the one side, and the unarticulated desires of all the other groups on the other side, mediated by a middle consisting of a politicized state vis-à-vis a silent yet highly influential disembodied private sector run by the super (invisible) rich. This middle is also beholden to the colonial masters who essentially sustain through grants and loans their politico-economic and economic-political fortunes, respectively. Experts/pundits articulate the desires of a middle-class wanting to flourish in terms of vague freedoms, under a limited but developmental government while clinging on to certain sentimentalities of culture and even Malawian-ness (whatever that means). At the same time, all the other groups whose desires are unarticulated aspire at least to a basic middle-class existence of proper housing, satisfactory access to education, health and security, and of course, three proper meals a day. Their desires are thus truncated and distilled into middle-class aspirations for lack of a voice of their own since they are seen as uneducated.

However, as a prominent African scholar notes (Mamdani in Citizens and Subjects), middle-class desires in the postcolony are necessarily blockades to the realization of a more universal material emancipation. This is because rights which are at the core of middle-class aspirations, within a context of high inequality, protect those who have, and deny those who don’t have. From our own experience, we all know that the postcolony is a highly unequal place and primarily so by initial colonial design and continuous postcolonial implementation across material (politico-economic), institutional as well as symbolic (socio-cultural) overlapping spheres. This is why in the past I have commented that if we are to develop more intentionally and not wait on “trickle-down” economics (which is less likely to work in a climate of insatiable greed for nothing ever trickles off the plate of the greedy if not for purposes of patronage and politics of division) we must at least devolve rights to their basic minimums, and leave the tertiary matters for a latter period. But I digress.

More importantly, the question that begs our consideration is this: what are we to do in order to find a more wholesome articulation of the Malawian condition? That is, how can we get beyond our immediate practicalities that enable our own survival at the immediate expenses of collective well-being? Looking at this question will enable us to understand ourselves better, to look into our own soul so to speak – and perhaps even understand why secession (which is unfortunately being mistaken for federalism) has become a very hot matter.

I will end like this – very few of us, including myself, know what being a Malawian is all about even on a superficial level. Americans have their fictions such as “the land of the free” or “the free world”, a pretext so powerful that it has enabled them to turn a blind eye towards obscenely grotesque and dehumanizing violence against other peoples in the name of trying to liberate and democratize them [by force] (see Libya, see Iraqi, see Afghanistan which have all become hell-holes much worse than when the so-called liberators found them. Great Britain is perhaps the only “major” country which has decided that its creed shall be “to remain globally relevant by doing everything the Americans do” and when China begins to assert itself, their creed will become “do everything the Chinese do”, and indeed this may have already started to happen. It’s really quite pathetic, and perhaps this is why Scotland sought to leave them and narrowly lost amongst other things Westminster and Brussels related.

South Africans have rapidly developed their own fictions such as “the rainbow nation” even though certain colors of that rainbow are more visible than others: to put it mildly, the loudest color of the South African rainbow is male as their citizenship is heavily gendered, and we haven’t even talked about race yet. Oh, I forgot, ours is “the peace loving nation” – which to me sounds like telling people to condone all things in the name of peace even to their very own eminent demise. This is why we peacefully let MEC get away with murder at the last polls even though we are far less tolerant of “murder” amongst ourselves because this creed is about being beholden to the grace and excellence of our leaders by keeping others and ourselves in check (also known as Kamuzu-ism). But in the absence of some kind of national creed, countries are reduced to nothing more that territories of personal practicalities that contribute to the decay people through those same practicalities hope to escape. After all, nations are nothing more than constructs – but some fictions are closer to reality than others, and this is what I was getting at when I listed those other countries as examples. Next time, I hope to make another contribution in which I will present what I think would be the steps towards the more wholesome of such fictions. I hope to do so before the beloved north leaves us… that is, before it constructs itself into a new nation.

By the way, with regard to the Northern secession agitations, I do not know if I will be leaving or being left. This is because I belong through my extended families to both places – the north and the south, and recently I have developed new roots in the central region as well. I hope those of us with parents from the north and the south will we be allowed to have dual citizenship to both Malawi (main) and Northern Malawi. Or perhaps we can be constructed into some group of disadvantaged people towards whom large sums of compensatory money will flow… lol. But perhaps this too would in fact be a closer illustration of the creedless practicalities that continue to bedevil us: mere symptoms of the same problems.

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.