Development practitioners recommend doing, at minimum, the following things to meaningfully move Malawi forward: build social capital that includes entrenching a culture of valuing solutions with broader and shared long-term considerations, valuing a spirit of self-reliance, a personal ethos of integrity, an ‘honest’ pay and hard-work;eliminate in-fighting (whether between religions, between tribes, or between regions); build human capital (adequately educate and train the population—all of it, not just the elites—to the level of the developed countries); eliminate official thievery (graft and corruption);set up a programme to build physical capital (economic infrastructure—especially communication infrastructure—to provide honest alternatives to income from graft and corruption) and build strong support systems for the rule of law (a reliable criminal justice system and constitutional bodies to protect the rights of all citizens and capital investments).The problem is our multi-party politicians seek elective office to serve personal interests that directly conflict with the stated requirements for meaningfullymoving the country forward.So guess who ‘appropriately’ trudged along to dinner with the advent of multi-party dispensation: project ‘corrupt Malawi’—a concoction of a plethora of programmes to deconstruct the social capitalthat existed with all manner of hand-outs (poverty programmes) with the ultimate aim of blinding the citizenry to thepoliticians’ thievery and,yes, thenon-state actors’ thievery in the name of the citizenry through all manner of graft, corruption and theft by deception or false pretence(s). And thus began a decade plus of pro-poor budgets (with emphasis on all manner of hand-outs) that the crafters of the programmes knew would have the desired effect of making the citizenry less self-reliant and more dependent on the state (and non-state actors) and,in short, breed blinding dependency that would allow official graft, corruption and theft by false pretences (by non-state actors) to take root or fester. In the same vein,we have poured close to a trillion Malawi Kwacha into the farm-input subsidy programme (fisp) to entrench dependence at household level in fending food for oneself, again, with the ultimate aim of breeding blinding dependence that bringsimilar effects.But we also have the malata-cement subsidy and food-for-work programmes to further entrench blinding dependency on state assistance for the general population. When late Kamuzu Banda declared ‘I want my people to have enough food, decent clothing and live in houses that do not leak’ he certainly never set out to give them food, clothing and houses, rather he set out to create an economic environment that would allow his people to afford these basics for themselves but in the our present environment it is all about the state (and non-state actors) giving out these freebies. The state should never be in the business of providing food, clothing and housing for its population,much less farm-inputs and implements, except in emergency situations (a declared state-of-emergency).
It is, however, no secret that these programmes are notorious for their lack of accountability and their procurement has become synonymous with thieving on a mammoth scale and that is the true attraction of these programmes to both our multi-party politicians and their partners in crime (our multi-party non-state actors)—over two-thirds of our national budget is hand-outs of all forms to unrepentant indolents of all shades that previously could do or have traditionally done for themselves many of the things our multi-party state (and our multi-party non-state actors) wishes to do for them.
Our multi-party politicians (and our multi-party non-state actors) are investing in poverty (non-productivity) on a scale unheard-of conveniently believing it will yield prosperity to the nation (how laughable!). As we now all know our multi-party chiefs and multi-party village heads can now speak fluently the language of graft and corruption thanks to fisp, but we also have our farm-input suffocated soils and farm-input drank waters in our rivers and lake to thank fisp for andnothing to show for food security—I have heard the quartet and the crowd we call our Finance Ministers tell the nation they would only abandon their twin poverty programmes (farm-input and malata-cement subsidies) ‘over their mutilated bodies’, in-spite of the over-abundant evidence that these programmes are impoverishing the citizenry?
A judicial system that delivers blind justice would not serve the party-in-governmentwell because the multi-party justice system is normally a lethal weapon used against multi-partyopposition politicians (and those that do not support the government positions) nor would amulti-party environment where the general population is sufficiently literateand sufficiently self-reliant to know that hand-outs impoverish them more than they benefit them auger well with our multi-party politics becausemulti-party politicking delivers hand-outs when all is said and done.
Our multi-party politics survives on the principle of ‘you are either with us or against us’ that is served well by politics of patronage, affiliation or discrimination (by tribe, region, religion and blood ties) and would be dealt a deathly blow if in-fighting of any form were eliminated or kept to a minimum or indeed permanently donewith.
Even as a country, we have grown too reliant on assistance from outside for problems manageable with local resources or local solutions to the detriment of a national spirit of self-reliance—how often have we passed the bowl around (the globe) for assistancefor natural calamities that do not pass for calling for external assistance but,maybe, this should not come as a huge surprise considering that the same elements that desire to entrench debilitating and blinding dependence at individual and household levels are the same elements crafting state policies?
Our multi-party quartet (BakiliMuluzi, BinguwaMutharika, Joyce Banda and Peter Mutharika) left no stone unturned in their ruinous attempts to deconstruct whatever social capital existed during their tenure(s) with their tomblike embrace of poverty programmes as centre-pieces of their ‘development’ agendas.
I do not see anything in our poverty programmes and ‘bowl-passing-for-alms’ approach that can catalyse and re-awaken the Malawian ethos of self-reliance, hard-work and honest ‘pay’ that transformed a pre-independence semi-primitive economy into a post independence ‘mini-tiger’ economy characterized by a strong increase in investments in both physical and human capital where the population experienced new incentives and opportunities for education and investment and our country took bold steps to transition from high-labour-content manufacturing opportunities (textiles, electronic assembly, etc) to higher value added manufacturing which pushed the 70’s economic growth figures for the country to yet unattained dizzying heights.