(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.
