(purely my views, accurate or not)
Malawi is rocking the BBC world service station as we speak and this is owing to a rather unexpected uprising of this usually extremely tolerant and patient people. The reason why it’s come to that (riots) is clearly that the critical point has been reached in the system, and as with any system, the valve has blown eventually. But let me tell you, one could see this happening a long time coming.
The president of Malawi, BWM, according to locals, seems to have embarked on a delirious mission since his being elected with a majority government for his second term in office 2 years ago. With that absolute power came absolute madness, with which he has implemented a series of controversial bills, without consultation. As I witnessed all this happening since my arrival in Malawi, I couldn’t help thinking “why is no one protesting about this or that appalling state of affairs?” The first few weeks since my arrival saw a state wedding for the ageing premier, with a royal banquet for 5000 guests being paid for by tax payers! All this amidst the most flagrant publicity, with ‘invitations’ even being sold off to the public. From then on, every single event relating to the president has been similarly surrounded with pomp and public praises from various parties in the local media. That was a most bizarre observation for me, indicating a certain fear among people who were overly cautious not to go out of favour with the main man. These events included Bingu’s award for a professorship from some dodgy Chinese, then Indian (can’t afford to lose ground to their communist neighbours!) university. Bingu also won some international award for best agriculture minister, which filled up the newspapers with praise messages from all his government departments (I wonder if the money for these actually came from the respective ministerial budgets)! Bingu then released a book (The African Dream) a couple of months ago and that filled the papers with similar tributes... except that this time some papers actually starting publishing less flowery articles on him too. That was no coincidence since early this year, Bingu announced a new law empowering the information minister to shut down any newspaper which he judged not right for the nation (amendment of Section 46 of the penal code)! Interestingly, the newspapers had already got a chip on their shoulder mid last year in an earlier attempt from the president to thwart them. He circulated an advertisement ban throughout his ministries to boycott the Nation publishers company (this is a newspaper that attempts to give a balanced picture of the reality in Malawi, while government owned TV and radio fill the population up with trivial functions of such and such minister). It came as no surprise that with the president’s popularity declining, the papers took the opportunity to have their own back.
Now let’s go back to the tirade of abuses of power that have accumulated in today’s overflow. Soon after state wedding came a saga about the flag, which I cautiously made reference to before. Almost everyone I know in Malawi thought that the idea of replacing the national flag was preposterous. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it! But Bingu insisted the country needed to revamp its image and that the new flag with it sun turned white and whole in the middle would represent the economic progress from the days when the sun was red and on top (very similar to a former ruling party’s emblem)! So despite widespread calls, including from the church, to refrain from this unnecessary waste of public money, he went ahead and changed the flag anyway around July last year. It has been the rumoured that the contract for providing the new flag was attributed to one of his relatives. Soon after that he realised that his name was no longer up to date on the countless portraits of him hanging in pretty much every office of every public building in Malawi. He was now no longer simply Ngwazi Dr Bingu wa Mutharika, but had become Ngwazi Professor BWM and all these frames should be amended accordingly! Maybe that was the reason why he also decided to upgrade from 1st class VIP status passenger to actual private jet owner instead...
Meanwhile the new Mrs Mutharika wasn’t staying in the shadows as she leapt into the limelight as the champion of the new Safe Motherhood campaign. Of course such philanthropic gestures are most welcome here, until it leaks out 10 months later that our magnanimous benefactor was going to be awarded 9million Kwachas in arrears for her “charitable” work! Meanwhile also, other reports of corruption were being announced, including allocation of land titles to his brother (tipped to be his successor) and other close associates for massively discounted prices. By then, the vice president decided she’s had enough and splintered off to form her own political party. Smelling competition and a threat to his now established autocracy, Bingu began to obstruct her, by slowly but surely withdrawing priviledges of office to her, while simultaneously cutting her budget off. That surely set the wheels in motion for civil society leaders and the opposition in getting today’s protests so remarkably finetuned.
But of course, one knows that such events described so far merely amount to petty corruption, which is widespread in bottom billion countries, and don’t normally give rise to such uprisings. So what’s happened that’s caused the balance to sway this time? Well the answer is I think in this sequence of events. End of last year, a national scandal arose as a university lecturer got arrested for using the example of the Egypt uprising to illustrate one of his political science lectures. This information got leaked by a police student implanted in his class. He got summoned by the Inspector General of Police, incarcerated without charge and eventually released. That caused a furore among university lecturers, who saw this as a direct threat to their academic freedom and demanded an official apology. As this never came, but instead further insults from the defiant premier, more than once, they organised protests. These got stopped by the police and a new billed got speedily drafted in requiring a payment of 2million Kwachas and a long process of police approval in advance for any public demonstration. The lecturers now had to resort to strike action. Bingu retaliated to that by closing 2 of the main university colleges. The status quo got maintained for months while the suffering students grew increasingly irate and impatient.
Seeing all this and Bingu’s persistent attack on homosexuality (since he was forced to pardon the couple having staged the first official gay wedding in Malawi), the British envoy to Malawi criticised the president for failing to uphold democratic principles in his country in a leaked cable. Bingu was particularly incensed by this remark and summoned the envoy to give him a piece of his mind. He was declared persona non grata in Malawi and packed his bags back to the UK. As it is with these childish disputes, it became a matter of tit for tat and Britain retaliated with all its superior economic might by suspending all aid to Malawi (the big bully decides to twist the neck of the little boy who scratched him in the schoolyard!). The implications of this decision have been catastrophic to ordinary Malawians. In a bid to stand on their own 2 feet, the Malawian government (rightly or wrongly) decided to pass an austerity budget last month by filling up for the deficit left by the donor shortcoming with increased taxes and reduced public spending (including ministerial ones). It is said that 40% of Malawi’s budget is provided by donor grants.
Now Malawians, who mostly live on less than $1 a day, are being made to pay more for their bread, milk, salt, water, sugar and other basic commodities. At the same time, the economy has been performing pretty badly (for a number of reasons attributable to both the government, foreign investors in Malawi and the international community, to remain impartial on that one) and the last few months have seen some pretty dire fuel shortages causing a lot of angst across the board. Instead of owning up to his government’s part in this crisis, Bingu again denied all responsibility and laid the blame squarely on others. A rather disenchanted population, as we now were clearly getting, didn’t need much to be pushed into a coordinated antigovernment protest by the opposition, on the very day that the president thought of coaxing the population further with a “public lecture”.
So Malawians took to the streets today. And met with a lot of resistance. And, as with all riots, there are bad seeds and these are intent on vandalism. The government, pretending to be primarily concerned about this, resorts to desperate measures to quell the situation and inevitably aggravates it- sending out threatening messages, banning live coverage through the media, shooting teargas and bullets at crowds etc. But this is the moment for Malawians. It has happened in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (partly). It is now time for it to happen for the first time south of the Sahara (Uganda wasn’t a national protest). Good luck Malawi. All the best to all you amazing Malawian people! May history be on your side.
15 July 2012
30 June 2012
Back ‘Home’
Long delayed finale..
Lots happened since I wrote this piece for VSO 3months ago..
So much that a finale redux might be in order...
Till then this is it!
Home is where the heart is they say. My heart is my home however. And my heart finds it challenging to suddenly let go of a place it fell in love with. Especially after a 2 year divorce with its former partner, going back to it can feel somewhat counter-current… a necessary sacrifice. It only takes a day to realise the causes of that divorce.
Coming back to the UK has been no honeymoon. The way in which it had to be done also did nothing to ease things. I had to bring forward my flight from the booked date to accommodate 2 interview dates. Both fell in the week just preceding it and I only found out about this some 10days earlier! The opportunity to get straight back into a training job in the UK after 2 years abroad felt incredible. I chased documents and references frantically in my last few days in Malawi. I wrote reports and worked on new things to add to my CV constantly, essentially consolidating my 2years in Malawi in the space of a week. Janet and I had to vacate the house and send whatever savings we had back to the UK. We held a massive house clearance sale, essentially giving away or selling every last bit of stuff we had less our packed suitcases. It was truly like a boxing day sale at Next! Of course, we also had to say our farewells to all our friends. We had to get a police report at short notice on a rainy bank holiday. We had to plan ahead of where we’d be staying in England and how I’d get to the interviews. It was one finely tuned machine of a life in operation that needed all the components to work optimally. With our experience of the unpredictability of things in Malawi and the excessive bureaucracy that normally accompanies all official matters, we thought that nothing short of a miracle would be required. I look back and realise what a miracle it was that got me and Janet here in one piece and ready for that interview. A miracle and a hell of a sleep deficit.
Thankfully the first interview went well and I got offered the job before my second interview was due. What that meant was a massive sigh of relief and a chance to organise our lives again before the job start date. I had 3 weeks to get back to some sort of normality here and thought I’d use it to relax and travel a bit. Once I started sorting things out, I realised that even 3 months rather than weeks wouldn’t be enough to get ALL of it done. The list seemed to get longer everytime I got back to it to assess the progress. The first priority was to find a place to live. With Janet working in Oldham and me in Chester, we had to find a place as close to the midway position as possible to allow both of us to commute within reasonable distance and time. Affordable furnished places to rent were so limited that we had to hold our breaths till a few days before our work start date and only managed to move in the night before! With a broken down boiler! But all it took to steel ourselves to the challenge was to recall how luxurious even this situation would have been in a Malawian context. In that time, we also had to sort out things like getting our car back on the road, our bank accounts working again, a new phone, computer and internet connection to name a few. All these things you normally don’t see as a big chore in your day to day routine. But that’s because you normally take your time to do them and you don’t need them done all at once and asap! On top of that, that bad old friend called British paperwork made its reappearance in force to us with all the pre-work checks that had to be done. I never thought I would say that but I missed the Malawian style, albeit much less efficient, of shortcuts. But there I was, getting used to being back in the UK. The saving grace was that I had been mentally prepared for it. So I simply got on with it.
All this was to be merely a taster of what it really takes to settle into a surgical job back in the UK. Since starting work in Chester, I have effectively gone off the volunteer link radar, with so many things taking priority suddenly over it. Once in a training job, a whole new string of responsibilities come with it and pretty much every day and evening, there’s something to read, write or research. Of course, that will ease out with time, but with the extra prerogative of relearning the job and catching up with latest developments I’ve been cut off from for 2 years, I cannot say I didn’t expect to have to bury myself in books for at least 6months.
But the whole experience is really rewarding. I view it as part of the whole volunteering experience. To say 2 years in Malawi is an understatement. I’ve already been doing this for 3, if you count the year of intense preparation that I went through before flying out and expect at least another till I can feel reintegrated properly in the UK. And then of course, I have built up a working link with Malawi as well now which I very much intend to revisit as much as my work and life will allow me to in the future.
And now to conclude, just generally on ‘life’… Life in the UK. That can mean both an exam that foreigners need to take to get British Citizenship or in my case, a life test that British Citizens have to take to get back to their normal lives after living in a developing country for 2years. It’s certainly not the most positive experience of all. It involves a serious infatuation with the colour grey and a suppression of certain human behaviours that attract the wrong sort of attention… like saying hello, how are you and how is your day going to people! I miss that about Malawi very much. Alright there were loads of challenges in human interaction and indeed so many aspects of it are, in my opinion, better here like women’s rights, gay rights, accountability etc. But at the very basic level of communication, the common denominator for mankind, which is greetings, the warmth and naturalness of Malawian interaction is something I would really like to see imported here. I miss the blue skies, the fact that a rainy day doesn’t mean a freezing day on top, the fresh fruits and vegetables, the joie de vivre, the “craig” of Malawi. But I’ve done my time there. I’ve lived it to the full. I’ve achieved what I went there to achieve. And it’s time for me to move on. Good memories it has left me with and I will cherish them forever. Wherever it is I end up, I will keep these memories and invoke them when I need a bit of heart warming.
Tionana Malawi. Ndidzakusowa! (Till we meet again Malawi. I shall miss you.)
Lots happened since I wrote this piece for VSO 3months ago..
So much that a finale redux might be in order...
Till then this is it!
Home is where the heart is they say. My heart is my home however. And my heart finds it challenging to suddenly let go of a place it fell in love with. Especially after a 2 year divorce with its former partner, going back to it can feel somewhat counter-current… a necessary sacrifice. It only takes a day to realise the causes of that divorce.
Coming back to the UK has been no honeymoon. The way in which it had to be done also did nothing to ease things. I had to bring forward my flight from the booked date to accommodate 2 interview dates. Both fell in the week just preceding it and I only found out about this some 10days earlier! The opportunity to get straight back into a training job in the UK after 2 years abroad felt incredible. I chased documents and references frantically in my last few days in Malawi. I wrote reports and worked on new things to add to my CV constantly, essentially consolidating my 2years in Malawi in the space of a week. Janet and I had to vacate the house and send whatever savings we had back to the UK. We held a massive house clearance sale, essentially giving away or selling every last bit of stuff we had less our packed suitcases. It was truly like a boxing day sale at Next! Of course, we also had to say our farewells to all our friends. We had to get a police report at short notice on a rainy bank holiday. We had to plan ahead of where we’d be staying in England and how I’d get to the interviews. It was one finely tuned machine of a life in operation that needed all the components to work optimally. With our experience of the unpredictability of things in Malawi and the excessive bureaucracy that normally accompanies all official matters, we thought that nothing short of a miracle would be required. I look back and realise what a miracle it was that got me and Janet here in one piece and ready for that interview. A miracle and a hell of a sleep deficit.
Thankfully the first interview went well and I got offered the job before my second interview was due. What that meant was a massive sigh of relief and a chance to organise our lives again before the job start date. I had 3 weeks to get back to some sort of normality here and thought I’d use it to relax and travel a bit. Once I started sorting things out, I realised that even 3 months rather than weeks wouldn’t be enough to get ALL of it done. The list seemed to get longer everytime I got back to it to assess the progress. The first priority was to find a place to live. With Janet working in Oldham and me in Chester, we had to find a place as close to the midway position as possible to allow both of us to commute within reasonable distance and time. Affordable furnished places to rent were so limited that we had to hold our breaths till a few days before our work start date and only managed to move in the night before! With a broken down boiler! But all it took to steel ourselves to the challenge was to recall how luxurious even this situation would have been in a Malawian context. In that time, we also had to sort out things like getting our car back on the road, our bank accounts working again, a new phone, computer and internet connection to name a few. All these things you normally don’t see as a big chore in your day to day routine. But that’s because you normally take your time to do them and you don’t need them done all at once and asap! On top of that, that bad old friend called British paperwork made its reappearance in force to us with all the pre-work checks that had to be done. I never thought I would say that but I missed the Malawian style, albeit much less efficient, of shortcuts. But there I was, getting used to being back in the UK. The saving grace was that I had been mentally prepared for it. So I simply got on with it.
All this was to be merely a taster of what it really takes to settle into a surgical job back in the UK. Since starting work in Chester, I have effectively gone off the volunteer link radar, with so many things taking priority suddenly over it. Once in a training job, a whole new string of responsibilities come with it and pretty much every day and evening, there’s something to read, write or research. Of course, that will ease out with time, but with the extra prerogative of relearning the job and catching up with latest developments I’ve been cut off from for 2 years, I cannot say I didn’t expect to have to bury myself in books for at least 6months.
But the whole experience is really rewarding. I view it as part of the whole volunteering experience. To say 2 years in Malawi is an understatement. I’ve already been doing this for 3, if you count the year of intense preparation that I went through before flying out and expect at least another till I can feel reintegrated properly in the UK. And then of course, I have built up a working link with Malawi as well now which I very much intend to revisit as much as my work and life will allow me to in the future.
And now to conclude, just generally on ‘life’… Life in the UK. That can mean both an exam that foreigners need to take to get British Citizenship or in my case, a life test that British Citizens have to take to get back to their normal lives after living in a developing country for 2years. It’s certainly not the most positive experience of all. It involves a serious infatuation with the colour grey and a suppression of certain human behaviours that attract the wrong sort of attention… like saying hello, how are you and how is your day going to people! I miss that about Malawi very much. Alright there were loads of challenges in human interaction and indeed so many aspects of it are, in my opinion, better here like women’s rights, gay rights, accountability etc. But at the very basic level of communication, the common denominator for mankind, which is greetings, the warmth and naturalness of Malawian interaction is something I would really like to see imported here. I miss the blue skies, the fact that a rainy day doesn’t mean a freezing day on top, the fresh fruits and vegetables, the joie de vivre, the “craig” of Malawi. But I’ve done my time there. I’ve lived it to the full. I’ve achieved what I went there to achieve. And it’s time for me to move on. Good memories it has left me with and I will cherish them forever. Wherever it is I end up, I will keep these memories and invoke them when I need a bit of heart warming.
Tionana Malawi. Ndidzakusowa! (Till we meet again Malawi. I shall miss you.)
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