Squandering goodwill

"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them."
Charles Marx

SQUANDERING GOODWILL

It is absolutely amazing how 2 well educated extremely intelligent men could have squandered all the goodwill and high hopes of the people of this country as well as supporters and well-wishers around the world. Bingu wa Mutharika and his brother, Peter, both are highly qualified, very smart people. Bingu has a background in economics and had risen through the international financial system before serving as the Executive Director of the SADC regional economic development group. His brother, Peter, was a law professor at Washington University in Missouri.

Expectations of Bingu were low for his first presidency back in 2006, riding in on the coat-tails of 10 years of corruption and venality. He was a bureaucrat, a bank official, shaped through the lense of the neocon economics of the World Bank and the American business model. He was not a politician who had honed his skills over the years in the hustings and backrooms. His nomination as Muluzi’s heir apparent was seen very much in terms of being the front man with the former president’s hand up the puppet’s backside. The people voted according to this understanding, so the first Bingu election results reflected the regional divisions that had existed since the democratic dispensation. The highly populated south elected the UDF man, Bingu, to a majority and the centre and north each elected their own parties reflecting their region and so they formed a divided opposition.

His first term was tormented and fractious, but Bingu earned the respect of the people all over the country for standing up to his controllers and outflanking them. He actually appeared to be sincere in his campaign to eliminate corruption and when he managed to get the debt cancelled and people saw real differences with roads improved, and services upgraded. He even defied the World Bank and re-introduced the fertiliser subsidy that quickly led to food self-sufficiency. The goodwill he earned during this period guaranteed his Democratic People’s Party a sweep in the election of 2010 and so it happened. The election united the country from north to south for the first time in many years and provided Bingu with a massive majority. So many good candidates had presented themselves to run for his DPP party that there was not enough room on the DPP slate. Some of these opted to run as independents and when they won, they still joined the DPP to help build upon the positive spirit from the first mandate.

Then the wheels began to fall off. Whiffs of something wrong became much stronger. Probably the signs were there before the election, but we were not reading them because we were so enthusiastic about the possibilities. Fleets of fancy coach style buses ferried people around the country to political meetings and rallies. Half the country was clothed in free T shirts and chitenje cloth wraps with the party logo and Bingu’s face. A fleet of Hummers was bought to chauffeur the party poobahs around. Then there was the Presidential Executive Jet. No-one could explain how they were paid for and how a brand new party had so much money to throw around. Appointments to university and parastatal boards which had been proposed through the appropriate channels were overturned by the President’s office and replaced by Lomwe names. The much hated education quotas were re-instituted limiting the access of northern students to tertiary education which immediately undercut the goodwill of almost all the many northerners who had thrown out their regional biases from the past in order to vote overwhelmingly for him. The former dictator, Hastings Kamuzu Banda was rehabilitated as his image, name and methods began to re-appear. Bingu took the old dictator’s title Ngwazi and began to show signs of growing intolerance to criticism and made vague references about dealing physically with his enemies.

Recently a university lecturer was called in for an interview with the chief of police, after referring to the popular insurrections in Egypt and Tunisia in his political science lecture. The lecturers at Chancellor College and Bunda College of Agriculture immediately protested this infringement of academic freedom as a wedge back to the fear and censorship in the days under the dictatorship of Kamuzu Banda. They go to work everyday, but refuse to enter the classroom until guarantees of academic freedom are reaffirmed and respected. The classroom boycott has dragged on for over 2 months and the government does not appear to be willing to budge in its hardball game with the professors.

More recently, the British High Commissioner was deported when a leaked diplomatic cable he had sent to London spoke critically of Bingu’s growing intolerance and autocratic tendencies.

But two things that really alienated large sectors of the public were way the new flag was imposed and the unsubtle campaign to run the President’s younger brother as the presidential candidate in 2014 in order to keep the leadership in the family. Bingu deemed the long standing, beautiful and distinct Malawi flag with its rising sun to be out-dated and used his massive parliamentary majority to impose, with literally no debate an unpopular new flag which kept the same colour bars but shifted them around and added a white sun-splash in the centre. It was a hugely unpopular move and almost everyone you speak to believes that a new government in 2014 will reverse the decision to change and return to the old flag. However, the autocratic side to his nature was revealed with a clause in the law introducing the new flag calling for the arrest and imprisonment of people flying the old flag. In addition, he disdainfully denounced and public dissent on the issue.

It has become standard in subSaharan Africa for leaders to rewrite the constitution to allow them to run for 3rd terms. Muluzi tried to do so as his second term expired, but popular pressure and activism from civil society prevented him from doing so. Rather than challenge this proviso, the Mutharikas opted to run brother, Peter, as the DPP candidate in 2014. Any challenge to the decision inside the party was forcefully quelled, and the popular vice-president, Joyce Banda was unceremoniously deposed. To increase his public exposure, Peter was made Education minister and trotted around the country to much fanfare. Government events were turned into DPP party rallies with praise singers announcing the new leader.

Resentment is high and people are talking about it. The irony of the deportation of the British High Commissioner is that he said nothing more critical in his secret cable than was published daily in the national press. The state controlled Malawi Broadcasting Corporation stills sounds as sycophantic as it did in the days of Kamuzu Banda. The popular singer, Lucius Banda, has a song which criticised Bingu’s shortcomings and was banned from the airwaves. On the other hand, the press is controlled by opposition parties and so far has been free to be relentlessly critical. Editorialists and columnists have lambasted the decision to deport the High Commissioner. Every major and sometimes minor faults are relentlessly pointed out.

The backdrop to it all is the next election in 2014. The campaign to elect his brother has gone hand in hand with the neutering of the National Electoral Commission. Ironically, the dictator, Kamuzu Banda created this neutral body to oversee the first multiparty election. Once he had lost the referendum on multiparty democracy in 1993, he followed the advice of civil society and created a representative forum from which the idea of the Electoral Commission was crafted. All parties were consulted in the naming of the Commission members and the first couple of elections were widely seen as free and fair. This time the Commission has had its funding cut, nominations have been withheld and there has been a clear attempt to stack the membership in favour of the ruling party.

The people are disappointed and frustrated and looking for a way out. The two older parties have already disappointed them in the past. Kamuzu’s Malawi Congress Party is still led by the much despised John Tembo who was the dictator’s right hand man. He continues his autocratic ways inside the party structure and will never get national support in an election. The corruption of the United Democratic Front is still fresh in people’s memories and has undermined its chances of winning the majority needed to take power. Joyce Banda has formed her own party after being dumped from Mutharika’s DPP, and while popular, it is not clear that she can pull together the backing needed to win within the next 2 years. Other leadership possibilities are not clearly apparent so the country is on hold. Everyone is hopeful and many are sure that the Mutharika’s will be ousted and Peter frustrated in his quest for power, but is not at all clear what will come after.