Malawians must not doubt my leadership – Bingu

Malawians must not doubt my leadership – Bingu waMuthaika

The deterioration in the relationship between the president and his country, reached a low over the weekend after the president’s speech declaring that it was important for the Malawian people not to doubt his leadership after all he had done. Maybe he had begun to believe the PR campaign on the billboards lining the roadside which vaunted his many achievements - the port at Nsanje, the improved roads, etc...

But since his re-election at the end of 2009 with a massive majority in parliament, he has accumulated a litany of errors in judgement that have squandered the goodwill he had fostered in the first 5 year term he served. It seems eerily similar to the Harper majority recently acquired in Canada. For that past 5 years, the government had to present a smiling face and espouse an agenda of reasonableness and good-will even though underneath it was clear there was an agenda filled with thorns waiting to be imposed. Now with a strong majority the iron hand had come out of the velvet glove.

The newspapers here are filled with commentators who outline the woes and the mistakes of leadership. But perhaps the more significant emblem of the arrogance of power and misreading of the temper of the people and the reality of Malawi’s position has been the spat betweenBingu and Britain. The many heavy handed policies which seemed to presage a return to the dictatorial tendencies of the Kamuzu era were commented on in a secret communication between the British High Commissioner and his home office. The communication contained material much less scurrilous than what appears regularly in the Malawi press. The cable (or probably an email these days) was leaked to the Malawi press who jumped on it to confirm their contentions about Bingu’s rule and rather than calling in the High Commissioner to berate, reproach or protest, Bingu declared him a prohibited immigrant and obliged him to leave the country like a common criminal.

It was clear that personalpride and not material consequences formed the basis for the decision, because within weeks the major donors used the action to underline their concerns about governance issues and to use the aid stick to oblige a return to conformity. British aid which has underpinned government running costs since independence was cut and a freeze imposed on many programmes from other donors while the situation was reviewed.

The old man pressed ahead and damned the consequences. He had to present a budget to parliament so he and his finance minister cooked up the unlikely text book zero-deficit budget. As far-fetched as it may seem in a country as far down the development index (number 160 out of 172), the budget made no bones about the people of Malawi bearing the brunt of making up for the loss of international aid. Here is DumbisoMoyo’s dream come true. According to this Zambian World Bank free market economist, without aid, governments would have to be more responsible and end inefficiencies and corruption in order to make it in the cruel dog-eat-dog world of market capitalism.

I was visiting some old friends in Karonga, the far northern town of consequence in Malawi when Mutharika delivered his speech.Everyone I met was laughing at and deriding the president for his lack of foresight. Sitting with these now retired gentlemen once again brought back tremendous memories of being with someof them in very different circumstances. Under the Kamuzu dictatorship there would have been no possibility of sitting in public and ridiculing the foolishness of the leader. Even in exile it was dangerous to be too identified with any criticism of Banda and his regime. Several of the men, I was with had sat on different sides of the fence during the dictatorship, but they now shared a common critique of an unpopular government which was fast losing traction.

One had been fairly senior civil servant and had served as an accountant in the foreign service and the Cabinet office. He gave an illustration as his critique of the zero-deficit budget. He told the story of the district museum, built as a local initiative, which gets its mail in a private bag, which used to cost K5000 per month in post office fees to maintain. As of July 1 that fee has been raised to K75,000 per month – an astronomical 15 fold increase. Police have been instructed to raise K28 million every month to pay their salaries by enforcing all possible road penalties. So at roadblock after roadblock we are asked for our license, emergency triangles and fire extinguishers and the swarm of window stickers is inspected with a microscope for shortcomings – certificate of fitness, insurance, license fees, Revenue Authority tax etc…, etc…, etc...

In order to update the system for allocating passports, the government invalidated all passports and obliged everyone to buy new ones regardless of the life expectancy of the old one and no credit for time left on your old passport. Now a new passport with a two week minimum delay is K15,000 but for a meagre K35,000 you can get it on the same day.Because the Malawi embassy is closed due to the diplomatic row between Bingu and the UK government, Malawi citizens in the UK and other countries of Europe represented through the Uk are now obliged to forwarded all their materials to Lilongwe.
The people are being made to pay at all sorts of levels. The prices of beer and newspapers have gone up as the VAT was applied to a wide variety of goods.

BakiliMulizi chose Bingu as his successor to avoid Aleke becoming the presidential candidate as the 1st vice-president of the UDF party. He was vaunted as the economic engineer needed to put the Malawian economy right. He did, in fact, do some interesting and progressive things that heped return the country to food self-sufficiency and give the appearance of one of the highest economic growth rates on the continent. One policy initiative in particular has come back to haunt and debilitate. In an attempt to stabilise prices and provide a form of equity for the many smallholder tobacco growers, he tried to fix a minimum floor price at the auction floors to prevent prices going so low that the farmers couldn’t realise an adequate return to cover their cost of production.

It worked for a year or two while the transnational companies adjusted their supply chain to ensure they could get super-cheap tobacco form other sources and then they imposed their will by rejecting huge quantities of the tobacco crop sent to the auction floor this year. By not even offering to buy the crop they cornered the government into allowing the price to float downwards to allow some sales to occur, but the damage has been done. The Kasungu area where Makupo is located sells itself as the Greeleaf capital of Malawi and the effect of the low sales and prices has impacted the economy hard. Poor, cash-strapped farmers must sell now to have some money available for current needs. They do not have the substance or the reserves to wait out the current prices lump and sell when prices go up. Every merchant in Kasungu will complain about the economy and the poor business they are doing.

As an economic engineer, his dreams of acquiring plentiful cheap power from the CaboraBassa hydro-electric dam and making the lower Shire river into a regional transport hub have fallen afoul of his own mismanagement of international relations and the exorbitant demands of Mozambique trying to maximize its leverage over a landlocked country by charging top dollar whenever possible. Malawi and Mozambique couldn’t agree on the price to pay for the power they wanted. Now electric outages occur with such regularity that it has become confusing trying to distinguish between planned and advertised load-shedding and ESCOM incompetence. The huge investment to make Nsanjea deep water port capable of receiving heavy goods barge traffic was meant to be the first step in a regional plan in which containers would be off-loaded to trains for shipment to the commercial centre of Blantyre and further beyond to Zambia. But a dispute with Mozambique over managing the waterway has kept the port inactive. It would have been logical to assume that such a basic step as ensuring such agreement before the project was begun and the investment was made.

Do not even bring up the fuel shortages as another sign of bad financial management. The poor hardly feel the loss of petrol and diesel except when they travel and the minibus operators charge back the black market prices they are forced to pay for fuel. The elite who own cars are fit to be tied.

It has never been this bad and it is all tied together: forex, deporting the British High Commissioner, tobacco prices, increased taxes, zero-deficit budgets, ports that do not receive any traffic, electricity outages. It is small wonder that people doubt or even mock his handling of the affairs of state and rather economic affairs. Still he says; “Trust me.”