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.