PETITION TO HIS EXCELLENCY THE STATE PRESIDENT
OF THE REPUBLIC OF MALAWI ON THE QUOTA SYSTEM (31st DECEMBER 2009)
Preamble
The Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP), Synod of Livingstonia (hereinafter referred to as the Synod), dates back to 1875 with the arrival of Scottish missionaries. The Synod believes in openness, mutual trust, respect and true love as it carries out its mandate. It strives to reach out to all the people with the message of hope and love in this world of disorder, moral decay and political turmoil. Apart from evangelical work, it provides education, health and relief services to people, regardless of faith affiliation, that fall under its jurisdiction.
The Synod recognizes that education is a good force that develops human qualities, intelligence, talents and conscience for satisfaction of physical, social, economic and spiritual needs. Thus, education has the potential to lift citizens out of their poverty and increases their capacity to participate in the development process. Through this inherent power, education is an important tool for development.
The Synod also recognises that good governance and respect for the rule of law are critical to the political, economic and social development of a country. Accordingly, the Synod has the moral responsibility of speaking on matters that threaten the well-being of the voiceless and the marginalized.
Our Concerns
The Synod realizes that Malawi is currently grappling to address a number of national issues like fuel and forex shortage, the quota system and the devastating effects of earthquakes in Karonga and some parts of Chitipa. While concerted efforts have been registered on helping victims of the earthquakes, the quota system of selecting students into public learning institutions seem to be getting entrenched. Government’s resolve is evident from its communication dated 3rd September 2009 from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. This marked an official declaration putting quota system back into play irrespective of its illegality as challenged in 1993 country courts.
While the Synod’s stand on the quota system had already been clearly stated and communicated through a press statement, we are startled that the practice has been extended to the selection of pupils into secondary schools at the expense of the merit system. We are reliably informed that 2009 initial Form One selection was based on merit as had been the case in the past. However, that selection was discarded on instructions from ‘above’ in order to accommodate the quota system. This, unfortunately, has resulted into glaring disparities in the allocation of spaces in national secondary schools between and among the country’s three regions.
Concerned with this development and other issues, the Synod held an emergency meeting at Ekwendeni on 30th December 2009. The meeting critically reflected on the issues and made a number of observations.
1. The Synod is surprised and concerned that the government is blatantly misinforming the general public that the Synod boycotted the interdenominational prayers for earthquake victims held in Blantyre. The truth of the matter is that our representative, Rev. Maurice Munthali, was rejected by State House for undisclosed reasons. The Synod views such government machinations as irresponsible.
2. The Synod reiterates and reifies its position of opposing the quota system of selecting students into public learning institutions; including secondary schools as has been the case with this year’s Form One selection. Without fear of repetition, the Synod fails to appreciate the reintroduction of the quota system on the following grounds:
a) Quota system was outlawed in 1993
The Synod of Livingstonia believes that it is out of question to reintroduce the system or policy when it was successfully outlawed in 1993 when Charles Mhango, Ambokire Salimu, William Kaunda and Christopher Chilenga successfully challenged it in the High Court of Malawi. Its reintroduction and implementation is, therefore, a contempt of court.
b) Quota system is not a solution to challenges in the education sector
The education sector in Malawi experiences numerous challenges like high pupil-teacher ratio, shortage of qualified teachers, low teacher motivation, inadequate teaching and learning materials, poor and inadequate infrastructure. Unfortunately, proponents of the quota system fail to appreciate these challenges as root causes of disparities but instead dwell on petty and divisive statistics. The Synod expected that the Government of Malawi would focus its energies on addressing these root causes by, say, building more schools and universities. The Synod appreciates that the aforementioned challenges need to be addressed through some ‘affirmative action’ but certainly not through the quota system.
c) Quota system is discriminatory
The quota system contradicts various international human rights instruments that the Malawi Government has ratified. Such instruments recognize the right to education as inherent and empowering. These instruments place an obligation on states to provide equitable access to education for ALL without discrimination. For instance, article 2 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights; article 2 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1979); and article 2 of African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights all expressly prohibit any form of discrimination based on national, ethnic or social origin. The World Declaration on Education (1990), and the UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education (1962) are also unequivocal on the same. The same is provided for in the Republican Constitution under sections 20 and 25.
The Livingstonia Synod acknowledges that government has an obligation of protecting its entire people from any form of discrimination and taking positive action to promote their rights. On the contrary, the quota system is discriminatory in that selection into public learning institutions is based on ethnicity and social origin. The CCAP Synod of Livingstonia feels that the policy is only aimed at suffocating the voice and capabilities of a minority group of similar and cultural roots. Unfortunately, the President has often referred to the North as a minority group in terms of population (12% of national population), and that it only contributes about 20% of the national GDP. Such assertions only qualify the north as a distinct region, hence not wrong to call people from the north a minority group. On this basis, the quota system also defeats the objects of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious or Linguistic Minorities (adopted on 18th December, 1992 under Article 5 Sec 1 Resolution 47/135). The Declaration calls for the state ‘to plan and implement national policies and programmes with due regard for the legitimate interests of persons belonging to minorities’. The Malawi government is far from fulfilling this obligation by virtue of not listening to the concerns from northerners and other quarters. After all, the test of democracy lies in listening to the voices of the minorities.
d) Quota system and the principle of equitable access
The quota system in secondary schools and tertiary education as a principle of equity raises more questions than answers. The Synod wonders if the quota system really ensures equitable access when only 13.2% of pupils from the north have been selected to national secondary schools versus 41.58% and 45.39% from the central and southern regions. Refer to the appendix.
e) Quota system is root for divisions
Identifying people by district or region of origin becomes inconceivable since such discriminatory policies have the potential to breed resentment and hatred among different groups of people, considering that Malawi is a multiethnic nation with numerous intermarriages. The world has proved not to benefit from such discriminatory policies in any way as witnessed by conflicts in countries like Sri-Lanka, Sierra Leone, Malaysia and Rwanda whose genesis bordered on discriminatory policies that were a quota system of some kind. It is with such a background that the Synod of Livingstonia views the quota system as not in any way promoting values of nationhood. Rather, it leaves an impression of having ill motives as it institutionalizes ethnic and regional differences.
f) Quota system will compromise the quality of education
The quota system has silent assumptions like similar demographic factors amongst districts, similar conditions that learners are subjected to at home and at school as well as similar performance and capacity of learners. It also assumes equal distribution of educational facilities amongst districts. On the contrary, Malawi’s education system is merit-based as seen by the administration of the same exams to all the learners at each level regardless of the varying conditions on the ground that learners are subjected to. The Synod fears that the quota system will compromise the very purpose examinations serve, separating less able students from more able students, a role that quota system cannot play. After all, there is anecdotal evidence that the Ministry of Education has concocted grades to suit the whims of the proponents of the quota system. Such concoctions may have led to the selection of pupils into secondary schools of mediocre performers at the expense of meritorious pupils.
g) Quota system is not applicable to Malawi
Implementation of the quota system is far from being an affirmative action. The Synod recognizes that the quota system is being implemented in European countries but not in the SADC region. Where the quota system is applied, it is aimed at balancing the rich and the poor and not based on population or place of origin. The quota system should not be compared to the affirmative action applied to girls in accessing higher education in Malawi which addresses the root causes of the cultural perceptions that people have over girls in education.
h) Quota system is a betrayal to the people of Malawi
The DPP government was voted into power based on its election manifesto that espouses unity and justice, among other issues. The manifesto is silent on such divisive policies like the quota system. On that basis, Malawians, including the people from the north, overwhelmingly voted for the DPP. It is unthinkable, therefore, that the President keeps on lashing at northerners and antagonizing them with fellow Malawians from the central and southern regions. This defeats what the president preaches that we are all Malawians when he publicly categorizes people from the north. The president has also labeled northerners as academic cheats in his ‘Kucheza ndi a Malawi’ programme. The Synod considers such unsubstantiated statements as irresponsible and demeaning to the office of the president.
Recommendations
The Synod, therefore, recommends the following to his Excellency the State President and the Government of Malawi:
1. The quota system should not be implemented at any cost considering the aforementioned reasons and challenges. Accordingly, the Synod does not recognise this year’s Form One selection. We would like, therefore, to appeal to government to annul the selection results and that students should not report for classes until the issue is reversed, at least in national secondary schools;
2. The disparities in accessing secondary school and higher education as pointed out by the proponents of this policy, including the government, are mere symptoms of a problem. The government should, therefore, address the root causes of such disparities, not its symptoms.
3. The Government should work towards formulating policies that unify the people considering that Malawi is a multiethnic nation.
4. Government should at all times consult people on critical issues that affect their lives, including on the policy on ‘equitable access to higher education’.
5. The Government should respect the rule of law and not pursue undemocratic, oppressive and discriminatory ideologies like the quota system.
6. The government should not single out individuals on decisions made by the Synod. A case in point is the recent attacks on the personality of the Moderator of the Synod, Rev. Mezuwa Banda, and the Deputy General Secretary, Rev. Maurice Munthali, who have often spoken on behalf of the Synod on national issues, including the controversial quota system.
Signed On Behalf of the C.C.A.P. Synod of Livingstonia by the following delegates:
Rev. M.M. Banda Synod Moderator ………………………………..
Rev. Baloyi Moderator Elect ………………………………..
Rev. N.L. Nyondo Synod General Secretary ………………………………..
Rev. M.C.E. Synod Deputy General Secretary ………………………………..
MR.H.C.T. Nthakomwa Synod General Treasurer ………………………………..
Rev……………………….Chitipa Presbytery …………………………………
Rev……………………….Ngerenge Presbytery ……………………………….
Rev……………………….Karonga Presbytery …………………………………
Rev……………………….Rumphi Presbytery …………………………………
Rev……………………….Livingstonia Presbytery …………………………………
Rev………………………Jombo Presbytery …………………………………
Rev…………………….....Njuyu Presbytery …………………………………
Rev……………………….Ekwendeni Presbytery …………………………………
Rev……………………….Loudon Presbytery …………………………………
Rev……………………….Mpasazi Presbytery …………………………………
Rev……………………….Bandawe Presbytery …………………………………
Rev……………………….Wenya Presbytery …………………………………
Rev……………………….Misuku Presbytery …………………………………
Rev………………………. Johannesburg Presbytery …………………………………
Rev……………………….Euthini Presbytery ………………………………...
Rev……………………….Milala Presbytery …………………………………
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Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
ONE OF THE CHALLENGES FACING DEMOCRACY IS THE MEANS THROUGH WHICH TO
According to World Book encyclopedia (Vol. 5, 2001), democracy is a
government whereby supreme power to govern is vested in the people and
exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free
electoral system. Democracy is then both a promise and a challenge. It
is a promise that free human beings, working together, can govern
themselves in a manner that will serve their aspirations for personal
freedom, economic opportunity, and social justice. It is a challenge
because the success of the democratic enterprise rests upon the
shoulders of its citizens and no one else.
(http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/whatsdem/whatdm2.htm/31 October
2008).Democracy falls into two basic categories, direct and
representative. In a direct democracy, all citizens, without the
intermediary of elected or appointed officials, can participate in
making public decisions, however modern society, with its size and
complexity, offers few opportunities for direct democracy. However, in
representative democracy, citizens elect officials to make political
decisions, formulate laws, and administer programs for the public
good.
To this effect, the issue of safeguarding the interest of the minority
from Malawian perspective becomes linked bearing in mind that in a
democratic society like Malawi two major classes of people and their
interests or rights will always exist and these are as follows; the
majority and minority. First, the word minority according to Francesco
Capotorti, in a Special Rapporteur of the UN Sub-Commission on
Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (1979)
minority is a group numerically inferior to the rest of the population
of a State, in a non-dominant position, whose members - being
nationals of the State - possess ethnic, religious or linguistic
characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population and
show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards
preserving their culture, traditions, religion or language.
Now Malawi has a young multiparty democracy which is less than 15
years old and is still facing challenges in safeguarding the interests
of the minority. According the website
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/whatsdem/whatdm2.htm/31(2008)
the rights of minorities do not depend upon the goodwill of the
majority and cannot be eliminated by majority vote. The rights of
minorities are protected because democratic laws and institutions
protect the rights of all citizens (Capotorti, 1979). However,
protecting the rights of minority populations is a fundamental problem
of a democracy because where "majority rules," how can a nation ensure
that all citizens have equal treatment and equal opportunities? This
paper therefore seeks to discuss the challenges that democracy is
facing in Malawi when it comes to safeguarding the interests of the
minority. Since the presence of majority rule and minority interests
are a factor that act as a challenge to Malawi, the discussion will be
based on the on the following points; religious issues and equality,
rule of law or constitution, development, economics, political issues
and control of power.
Firstly, on religious matters; Malawi has had the history of Jehovas
Witness having their churches burnt and this forced them to hide their
faith, Islam and the link with terrorism according to one well known
historian Desmond Dudwa Phiri. It was disgusting to hear that a
certain parliamentarian alleged that the Muslim (YAO) achawa should go
back to their country Sudan without knowing the harm that was caused
on the Yao as a Minority group in the country, (Capital Radio Malawi
radio news bulletin, 2007). This therefore brings evidence that during
the one party system interests of the Islamic religion were not being
promoted as opposed to the Christian religion (Chirwa, Kanyongolo and
Patel, 2003). But soon after the multiparty democracy was allowed
through referendum, the acknowledgement of cultural differences and
protection of minorities was evident in efforts by the government to
facilitate religious inclusiveness by such measures as the declaration
of Islamic holidays as public holidays by Bakili Muluzi, the former
president (Nation Newspaper 23rd July 2003, September). Hitherto, the
only public holidays were those commemorating events in the history of
the Christian religion. The government had also announced plans to
facilicitate consultations of getting rid of the Bible Knowledge as
one of the subjects in the secondary and primary school curriculum
with Religious and Moral education, which will mean that religion here
in Malawi, will extend beyond the Christian religion (Chirwa,
Kanyongolo and Patel, 2003)
Furthermore, former president Bakili Muluzi -a Muslim as well during
his tenure in the high office safeguarded the interests of this
minority religious grouping by among other issues advocating for the
freedom of worship. Freedom of worship led to more Muslim officials
from the Middle East to come and build their mosques and spread
messages to the entire country (Abdulla 2008). According to him, the
appointment of some ministers like Uladi Mussa, Cassim Chilumpha, and
Shaibu Itimu was done to impress the Muslim minority that Muluzi was
leading an inclusive government without looking at religious
affiliations. Muluzi’s successor President Mutharika also declared
that all Muslim believers should work half day on Friday so that they
go and worship. This never existed during the previous governments.
Mutharika has on a number of times attended Muslim celebrations up to
the extent of putting on the attire of such a religion-a sign that he
is protecting their interests. Abdulla says the re-appointment of
Jaffali Mussa (a Muslim by religion) as Minister of housing and urban
development is also a clear point that Mutharika is trying to protect
his image towards Muslims because he dropped Mussa from the cabinet on
political grounds.
But the public through snap interviews in Blantyre says the
re-appointment is politically motivated as he wants some Muslim votes
hence the need to include more Muslims in his cabinet. But a (Canadian
philosopher Charles Taylor) argues that the so-called difference-blind
approach to politics tends to negate the identity of groups by forcing
people into what he calls ‘a homogeneous mold that is untrue to them’.
He observes that if not well taken care of, minority interests are
then ‘forced to take a strange form’, that of the dominant culture.
The supposedly fair and difference-blind society is then not only
‘inhuman’ (by suppressing identities) but also ‘highly discriminatory’
(against minority cultures). (Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor).
The second point is that of rule of law or the constitution; This
comes into this subject because of the controversial issue of section
65 of the Malawi constitution which bars parliamentarians from
switching parties once voted in the national assembly. Needless to
say, the country’s parliament comprises the opposition which is in
majority and then government parliamentarians who are in minority
created after President Mutharika dumped the United Democratic Front
in 2005 on accusations that his bedfellows were letting his fight
against corruption down. Mutharika who later formed his democratic
progressive party has only four parliamentarians out of the 193 in the
august house. But other legislative members defected to his party;
this brought a standstill to the extent that some of the opposition
members demanded for the invocation of the section 65 law because the
constitution bars parliamentarians from leaving their parties and
joining others also represented in the house.(Malawi Republican
Constitution)
But in trying to safeguard the interest of the minority who joined
Mutharika’s government by accepting cabinet positions, the president
took it upon himself to challenge the issue in court. But the
presiding High Court Judge at that time Edward Twea referred the
matter to the constitutional court (Nation Newspaper 24 September,
2004). The court ruled that the section is valid however; president
appealed the issue to the supreme court of appeal claiming that the
section contravenes other constitutional sections 39 and 40 which talk
about freedom of association. President Mutharika defended his
minority group through thick and thin but the Supreme Court upheld the
ruling on the matter. Despite the fact that section 65 is still valid
as ruled by the courts, the executive arm of government lets it down
by not recognizing the courts’ decision. On this, President Mutharika
upon seeing that speaker of parliament Louis Chimango would use the
section to expel his members who are in minority advises his group to
obtain a court injunctions restraining the speaker from using the law.
Additionally, President Bingu wa Mutharika’s defending of Clerk of
Parliament Matilda Katopola on her removal from the position by
parliament following her alleged abuse of office. Mutharika does not
want to follow resolutions approved by the national assembly and
parliamentary affairs committee that Katopola be fired from her
position. Mutharika safeguards the interest of Katopola by using his
powers by replacing her on the position and threatening to use the
police to open the office if the parliamentary affairs will not do.
(Malawi News 22, July 2008.)
The other point is that of development, in my preamble; a political
analyst Samson Lembani told me in an interview that the voting pattern
of the country is divided into regions contributing to the usual
tradition of voting in a president and parliamentarian basing on
tribal and regional lines. He says that this fosters aspiring
presidential candidates to make developmental promises to each tribe
or region so they amass support. Lembani gives an example of the
central region which is dominated by the Chewa tribe, southern region
mixture of Yao, Sena and Lomwe while the northern region by the
Tumbuka speaking tribe. The southern region has the largest population
seconded by the central and then the north ( www.nationational
statistical office Malawi, 2008). Lembani concludes that voting basing
on regional and tribal grounds has made Malawi to suffer major
setbacks with some people saying that the northern cannot produce a
president because they are in minority.
However, it is argued that there is need to take care of interests of
the minority because they matter in parliament. Lembani argues that
safeguarding the interest of the minority through development is a
major tool that is used by the government authorities. What government
is doing by convincing such members in line with what one political
author of the Rights of Minority Cultures, Kymlicka wrote in 1995, he
draws further implications of group-differentiated rights for
vulnerable minorities within national states. Kymlicka warns that
dealing with decisions taken at national level that affect the entire
population, some form of special group representation such as a number
of seats reserved for a minority in parliament could be useful. This
is in direct reference to a Malawian situation where the northern
region which is regarded as the minority has its portion in parliament
hence the need for government to honour them so they amass supporting
during debates in parliament. Both former and incumbent president
Bakili Muluzi and Bingu wa Mutharika have on a number of times used
development initiatives to amass the support of the northern region.
Suffice to say that the northern region Malawi is a beneficiary
putting to the light that most of the leaders use development as a
tool for safeguarding the interest of the minority in the sense that
they plan development agendas for such small groups so they have
confidence in the leadership. Mbowela observes that president Bingu wa
Mutharika is using the same system to impress the north by launching
construction of road networks between Ekwendeni and Mpherembe, the
Karonga-Chitipa road in a bid to woo support from the people there who
are in minority. Mutharika knows that most of the people there had
been pro-opposition because of the political history dating back to
the time when almost all parliamentarians were for the Alliance for
democracy-AFORD. Furthermore, Mbowela says it is not only the north
that is in minority but other areas such as Lower shire which is
politically the bedroom for Gwanda Chakuamba where there is the
construction of the Shire-Zambezi waterway in Nsanje, Thyolo-bangula.
( Mbowela, N, 2008).
The fourth factor is that of Economic issues; First of all Malawi’s
economy is agro-based meaning that the country depends on agriculture
for forex earnings. However, Andrew Daudi secretary of agriculture
said that this to be achieved and make our economy vibrant against
other currencies such the south African rands, US dollars among others
there is need for a strong relationships between the government and
farmers. It’s a fact that farmers are voiceless although they have
their interests to be heard just like any other citizen of this
democratic dispensation. There are issues of lack of land for
cultivation, poor prices and farm inputs which the government has to
guard for the betterment of their livelihood. Daudi says within this
he means issues of improved prices for various produce such as
tobacco, tea and maize. Secondly it’s an issue affordable farm imputs.
From the look of things president Bingu wa Mutharika has assisted
farmers by setting tobacco and cotton prices for producers after
observing that farmers were being robbed by international buyers
(Daily Times Newspaper, May 16, 2007). Local producers appreciated the
move despite the fact that they were calling on the authorities to let
them set a price for them.
On this, Minister of Trade and Industry Henry Mussa argued in an
interview that soon tobacco will be setting prices for the crop on
their own once the tobacco regional block is formed with Malawi’s
neighboring countries such as Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania. He says
the government of Malawi has an obligation to safeguard the interest
of farmers. The other issue where the government is protecting the
interests of the farmers who are in minority is through the
introduction of the subsidy fertilizer program so that those local
communities can have access to o cheap fertilizer during each growing
season. Government realizes that maize production depends on
fertilizer.
Now knowing fully that lands is also becoming scarce in some
districts and to some extent communities do have land where to build
and farm, the authorities introduced a community based rural land
development project since 2004 with an aim of relocating those
landless people. They first discuss with land owners and they share it
with those who have nowhere to go in search for land (Minister of
Lands and Surveys Khumbo Chirwa) government realizes that some people
have no land where to build and grow crops for both commercial and
subsistence farming hence the initiative so they increase income and
agricultural productivity. “The project is currently underway in
Machinga, Mulanje, Balaka, Ntcheu, Mangochi and Thyolo, so far 15,000
households have relocated. Some people describe the gesture as a good
as it proves that the leadership of president Mutharika does not want
to let people suffer. In this project government identifies land for
those willing to relocate and thereafter gives up keep money before
hiring a Vehicle for them to do. It also depends as to which district
within the pilot phase has a place to relocate households.
On the issue of political and control of power; history has it that
over the years various Malawi’s leaders have used powers vested in
them to institute political decisions targeting certain individuals.
These decisions would be aimed at convincing the minority to become
popular and in turn think that the authorities are considerate. A
vivid example of this is the elevation and installation of chiefs by
the president through the ministry of local government and rural
development. (A Declaration of Liberal Democratic Principles
concerning Ethnocultural and National Minorities) goes so far as to
insist that no society and no country can be termed a liberal
democracy that does not acknowledge, implement and respect the rights
of minorities’. Or to put it differently, wherever minorities exist,
their being different must be respected by the majority as part and
parcel of their innate and inalienable right to be free’. (Governments
consequently have an obligation to refrain from all attempts at the
coerced assimilation of minorities, the Declaration states.) It is
against this that the leadership of Mutharika has cast the net wider
to have respect for some for some of tribes that were not safeguarded
for so long such Lomwe, Nkhonde and Tumbuka.
To substantiate this point there has been talk of president Mutharika
as having elevated Chiefs Kyungu of the Nkhonde tribe in Karonga,
Chikulamayembe of the tumbuka tribe in Rumphi and Mkhumba of the Lomwe
tribe in Phalombe to be paramount chiefs on political grounds.
This they say is aimed at pleasing such tribes that government is
considerate of them. By this these chiefs feel they are at par with
their counterparts which where elevated during the time of Kamuzu
Banda and Muluzi. At that time according to Billy Banda of the Malawi
Watch Human rights says that it is now that these chiefs have become
realized in a society. He says that the previous presidents were only
focused at the Chewa tribe as evidenced by the decree by Kamuzu Banda
that Chichewa should be taught in schools after English as a national
language.
However, a compelling political case for the recognition of minority
rights alongside individual rights has recently been made in The
Rights of Minorities where, it is said that the rights and liberties
of the individual, emphasized by liberal democracy, include the right
freely to associate with others – and hence have a ‘group related
dimension’ too, the Declaration points out. The group or minority
refers to ‘a community based on common cultural, linguistic or
religious heritage’, with which people associate freely and
voluntarily. Such groups have a right ‘to be different’ from each
other and from the majority in a particular state. This is in contrast
with the fact most of the Chewa chiefs were highly respected By Kamuzu
with little respect being to Chikulamayembe, Kyungu and Mkhumba
because they were regarded as minority. On the same [Kymlicka W ] says
that when it comes to issues mostly pertinent to the a specific
minority, such as education and language, Kymlicka advocates that
these matters be removed from national hands and transferred to the
minority by way of some right to self-government. True to this during
the recent inauguration of paramount Mkhumba various speakers even the
president himself called on the introduction of enough literature for
the language so that the future generation is able to read and speak
the language. This is the reason why they also launched the Mulhakho
wa alhomwe association to help advocate for the wishes of the tribe.
In conclusion, the lesson that could be drawn from this essay is that
incumbent president Bingu wa Mutharika used his powers vested in him
to declare that Muslims should pray on Friday which was not there even
during the previous leaders. Furthermore he maintained some of the
people in his cabinet merely because they are Muslims in effort to
safeguard the democratic interest of the Muslim minority group. During
the tenure of former president Bakili Muluzi, he introduced a holiday
for the Islamic religion which was the first ever besides calling for
the freedom of worship in the country which was not advocated for
during the one party system.
The other issue that we can conclude from the discussion is that
leaders use development as tool to protecting the rights of the
minority so they win their support in the elections or national
assembly. A clear example is that of any president promising the
northern region of Malawi more development projects. However, if you
if you scrutinize such projects they do not come to fruition for
example the Karonga-Chitipa which was once promised by Muluzi and then
Bingu wa Mutharika but until now it has not been completed.
Additionally the issue of the rule of law, incumbent president Bingu
wa Mutharika has been shielding his minority government from the wrath
of implementation of 65 of the crossing of the floor by challenging
that the section should be deleted in the constitution because
according to him it contradicts other sections 39 and 40. He also
advised his members not to remove injunctions that could leave the
speaker free to invoke the section. Mutharika also challenges the
courts of meddling into politics. He also shields his clerk of
parliament by not replacing her despite the fact that the opposition
dominated parliament voted to remove her from the office. On the
aspect of safeguarding the wishes of farmers he reduces the price of
fertilizer for the subsidy which targets rural farmers. He also orders
buyers of tobacco to buy at his fixed rate if not they will be chased
out of the country.
On the issues of politics Mutharika elevates traditional leaders
Chikulamayembe, Kyungu, Mkhumba to the position of paramount
respectively. This comes after he observed that the former president
did not respect leaders of such tribes. All in all the above
summarized points proves the point that there are challenges facing
democracy in trying to safeguard the interests of the minority.
REFERENCE
Abdulla, I, Bangwe Madrassah Islamic Centre in an interview, November 3, 2008
Chirwa, K, Minister of Lands and surveys in an interview, October 24, 2008
Daily Times Newspaper, May 16, 2007
Daudi, A, Principal Secretary in the ministry of agriculture and food
security in an interview October 14, 2008
Francesco Capotorti, Special Rapporteur of the UN Sub-Commission on
Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, in 1979.
Growth, J, Alexander, World book encyclopedia (Vol. 5, 2001), pp 120-122.
http://www.usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/whatsdem/whatdm2.htm/31 October 2008.
http:)//www.nationational statistical office Malawi/accessed on 29 October,2008
Kanyongolo, F, Patel, N, Chirwa, W, Democracy for Malawi, 200, pp123.
Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995.
Kymlicka, Will (ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1995.
Lembani, S, political analyst, Konrade Adeneur Foundation, September 16, 2008
Malawi News 22-, July 2008, pp3
Mbowela, N, Political analyst, Mzuzu University in an interview,
November 22, 2008
Mussa, H, Minister of trade and industry in an interview, October 23, 2008
Nation Newspaper July, 23, 2003, pp4
Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1992.
Phiri, D, Historian and economists, in an interview with capital fm in
Day Break Malawi program, July 6, 2007.
government whereby supreme power to govern is vested in the people and
exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free
electoral system. Democracy is then both a promise and a challenge. It
is a promise that free human beings, working together, can govern
themselves in a manner that will serve their aspirations for personal
freedom, economic opportunity, and social justice. It is a challenge
because the success of the democratic enterprise rests upon the
shoulders of its citizens and no one else.
(http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/whatsdem/whatdm2.htm/31 October
2008).Democracy falls into two basic categories, direct and
representative. In a direct democracy, all citizens, without the
intermediary of elected or appointed officials, can participate in
making public decisions, however modern society, with its size and
complexity, offers few opportunities for direct democracy. However, in
representative democracy, citizens elect officials to make political
decisions, formulate laws, and administer programs for the public
good.
To this effect, the issue of safeguarding the interest of the minority
from Malawian perspective becomes linked bearing in mind that in a
democratic society like Malawi two major classes of people and their
interests or rights will always exist and these are as follows; the
majority and minority. First, the word minority according to Francesco
Capotorti, in a Special Rapporteur of the UN Sub-Commission on
Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (1979)
minority is a group numerically inferior to the rest of the population
of a State, in a non-dominant position, whose members - being
nationals of the State - possess ethnic, religious or linguistic
characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population and
show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards
preserving their culture, traditions, religion or language.
Now Malawi has a young multiparty democracy which is less than 15
years old and is still facing challenges in safeguarding the interests
of the minority. According the website
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/whatsdem/whatdm2.htm/31(2008)
the rights of minorities do not depend upon the goodwill of the
majority and cannot be eliminated by majority vote. The rights of
minorities are protected because democratic laws and institutions
protect the rights of all citizens (Capotorti, 1979). However,
protecting the rights of minority populations is a fundamental problem
of a democracy because where "majority rules," how can a nation ensure
that all citizens have equal treatment and equal opportunities? This
paper therefore seeks to discuss the challenges that democracy is
facing in Malawi when it comes to safeguarding the interests of the
minority. Since the presence of majority rule and minority interests
are a factor that act as a challenge to Malawi, the discussion will be
based on the on the following points; religious issues and equality,
rule of law or constitution, development, economics, political issues
and control of power.
Firstly, on religious matters; Malawi has had the history of Jehovas
Witness having their churches burnt and this forced them to hide their
faith, Islam and the link with terrorism according to one well known
historian Desmond Dudwa Phiri. It was disgusting to hear that a
certain parliamentarian alleged that the Muslim (YAO) achawa should go
back to their country Sudan without knowing the harm that was caused
on the Yao as a Minority group in the country, (Capital Radio Malawi
radio news bulletin, 2007). This therefore brings evidence that during
the one party system interests of the Islamic religion were not being
promoted as opposed to the Christian religion (Chirwa, Kanyongolo and
Patel, 2003). But soon after the multiparty democracy was allowed
through referendum, the acknowledgement of cultural differences and
protection of minorities was evident in efforts by the government to
facilitate religious inclusiveness by such measures as the declaration
of Islamic holidays as public holidays by Bakili Muluzi, the former
president (Nation Newspaper 23rd July 2003, September). Hitherto, the
only public holidays were those commemorating events in the history of
the Christian religion. The government had also announced plans to
facilicitate consultations of getting rid of the Bible Knowledge as
one of the subjects in the secondary and primary school curriculum
with Religious and Moral education, which will mean that religion here
in Malawi, will extend beyond the Christian religion (Chirwa,
Kanyongolo and Patel, 2003)
Furthermore, former president Bakili Muluzi -a Muslim as well during
his tenure in the high office safeguarded the interests of this
minority religious grouping by among other issues advocating for the
freedom of worship. Freedom of worship led to more Muslim officials
from the Middle East to come and build their mosques and spread
messages to the entire country (Abdulla 2008). According to him, the
appointment of some ministers like Uladi Mussa, Cassim Chilumpha, and
Shaibu Itimu was done to impress the Muslim minority that Muluzi was
leading an inclusive government without looking at religious
affiliations. Muluzi’s successor President Mutharika also declared
that all Muslim believers should work half day on Friday so that they
go and worship. This never existed during the previous governments.
Mutharika has on a number of times attended Muslim celebrations up to
the extent of putting on the attire of such a religion-a sign that he
is protecting their interests. Abdulla says the re-appointment of
Jaffali Mussa (a Muslim by religion) as Minister of housing and urban
development is also a clear point that Mutharika is trying to protect
his image towards Muslims because he dropped Mussa from the cabinet on
political grounds.
But the public through snap interviews in Blantyre says the
re-appointment is politically motivated as he wants some Muslim votes
hence the need to include more Muslims in his cabinet. But a (Canadian
philosopher Charles Taylor) argues that the so-called difference-blind
approach to politics tends to negate the identity of groups by forcing
people into what he calls ‘a homogeneous mold that is untrue to them’.
He observes that if not well taken care of, minority interests are
then ‘forced to take a strange form’, that of the dominant culture.
The supposedly fair and difference-blind society is then not only
‘inhuman’ (by suppressing identities) but also ‘highly discriminatory’
(against minority cultures). (Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor).
The second point is that of rule of law or the constitution; This
comes into this subject because of the controversial issue of section
65 of the Malawi constitution which bars parliamentarians from
switching parties once voted in the national assembly. Needless to
say, the country’s parliament comprises the opposition which is in
majority and then government parliamentarians who are in minority
created after President Mutharika dumped the United Democratic Front
in 2005 on accusations that his bedfellows were letting his fight
against corruption down. Mutharika who later formed his democratic
progressive party has only four parliamentarians out of the 193 in the
august house. But other legislative members defected to his party;
this brought a standstill to the extent that some of the opposition
members demanded for the invocation of the section 65 law because the
constitution bars parliamentarians from leaving their parties and
joining others also represented in the house.(Malawi Republican
Constitution)
But in trying to safeguard the interest of the minority who joined
Mutharika’s government by accepting cabinet positions, the president
took it upon himself to challenge the issue in court. But the
presiding High Court Judge at that time Edward Twea referred the
matter to the constitutional court (Nation Newspaper 24 September,
2004). The court ruled that the section is valid however; president
appealed the issue to the supreme court of appeal claiming that the
section contravenes other constitutional sections 39 and 40 which talk
about freedom of association. President Mutharika defended his
minority group through thick and thin but the Supreme Court upheld the
ruling on the matter. Despite the fact that section 65 is still valid
as ruled by the courts, the executive arm of government lets it down
by not recognizing the courts’ decision. On this, President Mutharika
upon seeing that speaker of parliament Louis Chimango would use the
section to expel his members who are in minority advises his group to
obtain a court injunctions restraining the speaker from using the law.
Additionally, President Bingu wa Mutharika’s defending of Clerk of
Parliament Matilda Katopola on her removal from the position by
parliament following her alleged abuse of office. Mutharika does not
want to follow resolutions approved by the national assembly and
parliamentary affairs committee that Katopola be fired from her
position. Mutharika safeguards the interest of Katopola by using his
powers by replacing her on the position and threatening to use the
police to open the office if the parliamentary affairs will not do.
(Malawi News 22, July 2008.)
The other point is that of development, in my preamble; a political
analyst Samson Lembani told me in an interview that the voting pattern
of the country is divided into regions contributing to the usual
tradition of voting in a president and parliamentarian basing on
tribal and regional lines. He says that this fosters aspiring
presidential candidates to make developmental promises to each tribe
or region so they amass support. Lembani gives an example of the
central region which is dominated by the Chewa tribe, southern region
mixture of Yao, Sena and Lomwe while the northern region by the
Tumbuka speaking tribe. The southern region has the largest population
seconded by the central and then the north ( www.nationational
statistical office Malawi, 2008). Lembani concludes that voting basing
on regional and tribal grounds has made Malawi to suffer major
setbacks with some people saying that the northern cannot produce a
president because they are in minority.
However, it is argued that there is need to take care of interests of
the minority because they matter in parliament. Lembani argues that
safeguarding the interest of the minority through development is a
major tool that is used by the government authorities. What government
is doing by convincing such members in line with what one political
author of the Rights of Minority Cultures, Kymlicka wrote in 1995, he
draws further implications of group-differentiated rights for
vulnerable minorities within national states. Kymlicka warns that
dealing with decisions taken at national level that affect the entire
population, some form of special group representation such as a number
of seats reserved for a minority in parliament could be useful. This
is in direct reference to a Malawian situation where the northern
region which is regarded as the minority has its portion in parliament
hence the need for government to honour them so they amass supporting
during debates in parliament. Both former and incumbent president
Bakili Muluzi and Bingu wa Mutharika have on a number of times used
development initiatives to amass the support of the northern region.
Suffice to say that the northern region Malawi is a beneficiary
putting to the light that most of the leaders use development as a
tool for safeguarding the interest of the minority in the sense that
they plan development agendas for such small groups so they have
confidence in the leadership. Mbowela observes that president Bingu wa
Mutharika is using the same system to impress the north by launching
construction of road networks between Ekwendeni and Mpherembe, the
Karonga-Chitipa road in a bid to woo support from the people there who
are in minority. Mutharika knows that most of the people there had
been pro-opposition because of the political history dating back to
the time when almost all parliamentarians were for the Alliance for
democracy-AFORD. Furthermore, Mbowela says it is not only the north
that is in minority but other areas such as Lower shire which is
politically the bedroom for Gwanda Chakuamba where there is the
construction of the Shire-Zambezi waterway in Nsanje, Thyolo-bangula.
( Mbowela, N, 2008).
The fourth factor is that of Economic issues; First of all Malawi’s
economy is agro-based meaning that the country depends on agriculture
for forex earnings. However, Andrew Daudi secretary of agriculture
said that this to be achieved and make our economy vibrant against
other currencies such the south African rands, US dollars among others
there is need for a strong relationships between the government and
farmers. It’s a fact that farmers are voiceless although they have
their interests to be heard just like any other citizen of this
democratic dispensation. There are issues of lack of land for
cultivation, poor prices and farm inputs which the government has to
guard for the betterment of their livelihood. Daudi says within this
he means issues of improved prices for various produce such as
tobacco, tea and maize. Secondly it’s an issue affordable farm imputs.
From the look of things president Bingu wa Mutharika has assisted
farmers by setting tobacco and cotton prices for producers after
observing that farmers were being robbed by international buyers
(Daily Times Newspaper, May 16, 2007). Local producers appreciated the
move despite the fact that they were calling on the authorities to let
them set a price for them.
On this, Minister of Trade and Industry Henry Mussa argued in an
interview that soon tobacco will be setting prices for the crop on
their own once the tobacco regional block is formed with Malawi’s
neighboring countries such as Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania. He says
the government of Malawi has an obligation to safeguard the interest
of farmers. The other issue where the government is protecting the
interests of the farmers who are in minority is through the
introduction of the subsidy fertilizer program so that those local
communities can have access to o cheap fertilizer during each growing
season. Government realizes that maize production depends on
fertilizer.
Now knowing fully that lands is also becoming scarce in some
districts and to some extent communities do have land where to build
and farm, the authorities introduced a community based rural land
development project since 2004 with an aim of relocating those
landless people. They first discuss with land owners and they share it
with those who have nowhere to go in search for land (Minister of
Lands and Surveys Khumbo Chirwa) government realizes that some people
have no land where to build and grow crops for both commercial and
subsistence farming hence the initiative so they increase income and
agricultural productivity. “The project is currently underway in
Machinga, Mulanje, Balaka, Ntcheu, Mangochi and Thyolo, so far 15,000
households have relocated. Some people describe the gesture as a good
as it proves that the leadership of president Mutharika does not want
to let people suffer. In this project government identifies land for
those willing to relocate and thereafter gives up keep money before
hiring a Vehicle for them to do. It also depends as to which district
within the pilot phase has a place to relocate households.
On the issue of political and control of power; history has it that
over the years various Malawi’s leaders have used powers vested in
them to institute political decisions targeting certain individuals.
These decisions would be aimed at convincing the minority to become
popular and in turn think that the authorities are considerate. A
vivid example of this is the elevation and installation of chiefs by
the president through the ministry of local government and rural
development. (A Declaration of Liberal Democratic Principles
concerning Ethnocultural and National Minorities) goes so far as to
insist that no society and no country can be termed a liberal
democracy that does not acknowledge, implement and respect the rights
of minorities’. Or to put it differently, wherever minorities exist,
their being different must be respected by the majority as part and
parcel of their innate and inalienable right to be free’. (Governments
consequently have an obligation to refrain from all attempts at the
coerced assimilation of minorities, the Declaration states.) It is
against this that the leadership of Mutharika has cast the net wider
to have respect for some for some of tribes that were not safeguarded
for so long such Lomwe, Nkhonde and Tumbuka.
To substantiate this point there has been talk of president Mutharika
as having elevated Chiefs Kyungu of the Nkhonde tribe in Karonga,
Chikulamayembe of the tumbuka tribe in Rumphi and Mkhumba of the Lomwe
tribe in Phalombe to be paramount chiefs on political grounds.
This they say is aimed at pleasing such tribes that government is
considerate of them. By this these chiefs feel they are at par with
their counterparts which where elevated during the time of Kamuzu
Banda and Muluzi. At that time according to Billy Banda of the Malawi
Watch Human rights says that it is now that these chiefs have become
realized in a society. He says that the previous presidents were only
focused at the Chewa tribe as evidenced by the decree by Kamuzu Banda
that Chichewa should be taught in schools after English as a national
language.
However, a compelling political case for the recognition of minority
rights alongside individual rights has recently been made in The
Rights of Minorities where, it is said that the rights and liberties
of the individual, emphasized by liberal democracy, include the right
freely to associate with others – and hence have a ‘group related
dimension’ too, the Declaration points out. The group or minority
refers to ‘a community based on common cultural, linguistic or
religious heritage’, with which people associate freely and
voluntarily. Such groups have a right ‘to be different’ from each
other and from the majority in a particular state. This is in contrast
with the fact most of the Chewa chiefs were highly respected By Kamuzu
with little respect being to Chikulamayembe, Kyungu and Mkhumba
because they were regarded as minority. On the same [Kymlicka W ] says
that when it comes to issues mostly pertinent to the a specific
minority, such as education and language, Kymlicka advocates that
these matters be removed from national hands and transferred to the
minority by way of some right to self-government. True to this during
the recent inauguration of paramount Mkhumba various speakers even the
president himself called on the introduction of enough literature for
the language so that the future generation is able to read and speak
the language. This is the reason why they also launched the Mulhakho
wa alhomwe association to help advocate for the wishes of the tribe.
In conclusion, the lesson that could be drawn from this essay is that
incumbent president Bingu wa Mutharika used his powers vested in him
to declare that Muslims should pray on Friday which was not there even
during the previous leaders. Furthermore he maintained some of the
people in his cabinet merely because they are Muslims in effort to
safeguard the democratic interest of the Muslim minority group. During
the tenure of former president Bakili Muluzi, he introduced a holiday
for the Islamic religion which was the first ever besides calling for
the freedom of worship in the country which was not advocated for
during the one party system.
The other issue that we can conclude from the discussion is that
leaders use development as tool to protecting the rights of the
minority so they win their support in the elections or national
assembly. A clear example is that of any president promising the
northern region of Malawi more development projects. However, if you
if you scrutinize such projects they do not come to fruition for
example the Karonga-Chitipa which was once promised by Muluzi and then
Bingu wa Mutharika but until now it has not been completed.
Additionally the issue of the rule of law, incumbent president Bingu
wa Mutharika has been shielding his minority government from the wrath
of implementation of 65 of the crossing of the floor by challenging
that the section should be deleted in the constitution because
according to him it contradicts other sections 39 and 40. He also
advised his members not to remove injunctions that could leave the
speaker free to invoke the section. Mutharika also challenges the
courts of meddling into politics. He also shields his clerk of
parliament by not replacing her despite the fact that the opposition
dominated parliament voted to remove her from the office. On the
aspect of safeguarding the wishes of farmers he reduces the price of
fertilizer for the subsidy which targets rural farmers. He also orders
buyers of tobacco to buy at his fixed rate if not they will be chased
out of the country.
On the issues of politics Mutharika elevates traditional leaders
Chikulamayembe, Kyungu, Mkhumba to the position of paramount
respectively. This comes after he observed that the former president
did not respect leaders of such tribes. All in all the above
summarized points proves the point that there are challenges facing
democracy in trying to safeguard the interests of the minority.
REFERENCE
Abdulla, I, Bangwe Madrassah Islamic Centre in an interview, November 3, 2008
Chirwa, K, Minister of Lands and surveys in an interview, October 24, 2008
Daily Times Newspaper, May 16, 2007
Daudi, A, Principal Secretary in the ministry of agriculture and food
security in an interview October 14, 2008
Francesco Capotorti, Special Rapporteur of the UN Sub-Commission on
Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, in 1979.
Growth, J, Alexander, World book encyclopedia (Vol. 5, 2001), pp 120-122.
http://www.usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/whatsdem/whatdm2.htm/31 October 2008.
http:)//www.nationational statistical office Malawi/accessed on 29 October,2008
Kanyongolo, F, Patel, N, Chirwa, W, Democracy for Malawi, 200, pp123.
Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995.
Kymlicka, Will (ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1995.
Lembani, S, political analyst, Konrade Adeneur Foundation, September 16, 2008
Malawi News 22-, July 2008, pp3
Mbowela, N, Political analyst, Mzuzu University in an interview,
November 22, 2008
Mussa, H, Minister of trade and industry in an interview, October 23, 2008
Nation Newspaper July, 23, 2003, pp4
Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1992.
Phiri, D, Historian and economists, in an interview with capital fm in
Day Break Malawi program, July 6, 2007.
Richard Chirombo Writes About Street Children, and Malawi's Democratic Path
Taking the children ‘home’
RICHARD CHIROMBO
The street child’s life is rough and lonely.
They have wishes, hopes, passions, inclinations and secret dreams- but all these cannot alter the state of facts and evidence, which point to dread and gloom.
John Kaliveni, 12, was once a moving hope. He had decided, some seven years earlier, to grow up in his patrimonial home- Mtengo Village in the area of T/A Kalonga, Salima.
That was before his father, the last surviving parent of their family, died in August 2003. When death struck, he- four older brothers and a sister- entered into the shadows. Hope for quality education went with the winds of death. Their seemingly little world collapsed is sorrow and hopelessness. Today, some seven years later, life is yet to return to the basics.
John ‘stays’ in Blantyre, though he has nowhere to really call home.
“The most painful thing is that I don’t know where my brothers and sister are: They went to Lilongwe to look for alms in 2004, and I chose Blantyre. We have never met,” said Kaliveni.
During the afternoon of March 24 this year, LifeLine Southern Africa-Malawi chairperson, Mary Dzinyemba, watched Kaliveni gently set a mahogany box on dusty ground along Mudi River. He then opened the top end of the equally box, stuffed old newspaper clips, forming his idea of a mattress, and ducked in.
It is home for him; the boy who once had a home and enthusiasm, now replaced with perpetual fear of extreme weather conditions without, and the hunger within.
“It was such a sorry sight, yet these are our own children. The nation can do better,” said Dzinyemba.
LifeLine-Malawi is working with its mother body to establish toll-free lines for orphans, street and other vulnerable children. Dzinyemba said the initiative aims to give children suffering from various forms of abuse a life line.
“It’s about giving children facing abusive circumstances another chance; the chance to get out (of these problems),” said Dzinyemba.
However, it is not only LifeLine that is thinking in ‘second-chances’; government has now joined the fray.
It all started when Patricia Kaliati, Gender, Children and Community Development Minister, visited Chilwa Reformatory Centre in Zomba earlier this year. It is either she prepared to say what she did, or else she was prompted by circumstances.
“It is a pity that, while many other children go about in the streets of our cities and town assemblies, places abound in our reformatory centres. Our child reformatory centres are underutilized. This trend must change,’ said Kaliati.
So started the beginnings of a campaign to relocate street children to reformatory institutions by February, and Kaliati has been resolute.
Times come when the truth comes home to many, and people begin to think beyond the narrow isthmus of selfishness. This truth has come to her so many times, as most children at Mkando Trading Centre in Kaliati’s constituency testify.
They have more than a dozen times been the target of Kaliati’s charitable-self, receiving a wide range of goods including blankets, cooking oil, scholarships, and clothes, among others.
Now that she is responsible for all Malawian children as minister, the former teacher merely wants to make her love national; the combined love of a caring mother and professional teacher.
This truth has also come home for women such as Mary Woodworth, director for Mulanje-based Friends of Mulanje Orphans (FOMO). She lives in the United Kingdom, at least the physical form of her, her heart stays in Mulanje.
Like all winds, it started small for her, too. She married a British citizen, who invited her to Europe.
“The children (there) were, mainly, well dressed, well-fed, well-educated. Well-versed with matters of the world,” said Woodworth.
When she came back home for a breather around the year 2000, the truth came home for her right at the airport. Too many differences in infrastructure and technological advancements.
There was, also, the sorry sight of children on the streets of Blantyre. She thought the problem was only common in Blantyre and Lilongwe, but was shocked to find that the situation was similar in Mulanje, her home district.
“Even worse. The HIV and AIDS pandemic was breaking communities apart, challenges of poverty and resource constraints were clouding prospects for the future. There was also the issue of girls dropping out of school. Something had to be done, hence FOMO’s efforts,” said Woodworth, touched by the invisible hand of truth.
The children in Mulanje welcomed her, and her gesture; but Kaliati seems to be in trouble making her love ‘national’.
“Some street children have gone into hiding. Many are running away, and this is quiet surprising. How could people run away from assistance? The thing is, we will not stop mid-way through the road, we will look for them and go on with the exercise,” said Kaliati.
A tale of love gone bad. Can love really go ‘bad’?
“Yes, it does. Depending on the approach you adopt to solve a problem. After all, how can children run away from help? My submission is that the initiative is good, but has been hastily implemented,” said Kenwilliams Mhango, Country Director for African Network for the Prevention and Protection of Child Abuse and Neglect-Malawi Chapter.
Mhango said there was no need for short cuts. The Ministry of Gender, Children and Community Development would have carried out comprehensive publicity campaigns to rid the campaign of any huddles in understanding, invested heavily in reformatory centre infrastructure, and won civil society support.
Take, for instance, the issue of location. He says the way child reformatory centres are concentrated sends wrong signals about the existence of street children, and the challenges they face.
“Do we have a reformatory centre in the Northern region? No. Don’t we have street children there? We do,” Mhango answers his own questions.
Mhango blames short cuts for exacerbating the situation, saying most children would willingly offer themselves up to such “a positive, life-changing move’.
He had ready examples. Take, for instance, the issue of his organization’s name: African Network for the Prevention and Protection of Child Abuse and Neglect- Malawi Chapter. It is such a long name, a winding road.
“Many people have suggested that we adopt a short name. They say the name is too long. But we say, “No, there is no need for short cuts when the name explains everything well. We are comfortable with both the name and the length of the name’,” said Mhango.
The short of it all is that there are times shortcuts pay, but mostly they do not pay.
The issue of reformatory and protective services for children has a long history, though the story is younger than when human life begun. In ancient times, when might was right, children had no right to live, and could be disposed of with little compunction.
Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian during the late 1st Century B.C., bears witness that many people in that once great empire, including the Ceylonese, could discard of children perceived to have no courage or endurance. Such children, when not killed, rushed into streets and public places.
The Greeks did not want any physically challenged children to grow, also. Plato accepted this status quo and Aristotle recommended a law prohibiting parents from rearing physically challenged children, which led physician Soranus, a 2nd Century practitioner, to instruct midwives to examine each child at birth and get rid of those not fit.
In Egypt, on the other hand, parents who killed their children were merely sentenced to ‘hug’ the corpse continually for seventy-two hours, the punishers thinking that it was not fit those who gave life to the child to die, but that they should be punished in such a way as to create repentance and deter them from committing any such acts.
Children’s rights enjoyed secondary status to national interests, necessitating strategies to bail them out of such a quagmire.
During this very early period, Athens and Rome had orphan homes. The name brephotrophia (for these welfare centres) was mentioned in 529 in Justinian law, one of the most influential pieces of legislation. With the rise of Christianity, the church provided for foundlings and every village had a xenodochium- a hospice for pilgrims and the poor, which also embraced children without homes.
By the Sixth Century, the brephotrophium at Trier had a marble receptacle with which abandoned children could be safely deposited secretly. Similar institutions in France in the Seventh Century were the forerunners of the welfare system of the Nineteenth Century, with the establishment of the first such hospice by Datheus, the archpriest of Milan in 787.
In Mesopotamia, the strategy was different. Starting from 6000 years ago, orphans and vulnerable children had a goddess. Writer Rig Veda also mentions another deity among ancient Hindus who rescued vulnerable children and endowed them with legal rights to protection.
The gods reflected a mirror image of humanity, affording a picture of what went on among people, and how wrongs could be corrected. This was supplemented by more laws guaranteeing rights of the child to protection, and included the Laws of Solon in 600 B.C., which required army commanders to raise, at the expense of government, children of soldiers killed in battle.
Wives of Roman emperors, who initiated child welfare programmes, emulated this gesture. Around this same time, St. Nicholas Thaumaturgos- wonder worker of the 3rd Century, who was also Patron Saint of children and protector of the feeble minded- revolutionized the phenomenon of child welfare.
Main strategies of offering child protective services has consisted of placing children in government run institutions, private organisations or under foster care.
Russian and British law also initiated early involvement of government in public welfare, with the main reliance being on alms-houses where, to off set expense and save children from the ‘sin’ of idleness, children were forced to work, according to The Battered Child, a book tackling the issue of child abuse and neglect in the world.
However, child protective services have not been without blemish, and their impacts have continually been questioned. An1881German report on childcare services stated that 31 per cent of illegitimate children died under foster care, allegedly from natural causes (but really from freezing, starvation and deliberate destruction). The report discovered that foster care givers had ‘discovered’ that the best way of getting rid of the children was to give them nothing but pacifiers soaked in brandy!
This was negative, sure, but helped in making sure that the issue of childcare rose from a relatively obscure position to a matter of public and professional concern in the US in early 1960s.
In all these cases, there is no report of children escaping- as Malawi has come to learn.
Only that Kaliati never gives up, and has a clever way of summing things up: “We are all still learning from all this and, no matter how difficult it proves or long it takes, we will place these children home. Reformatory centres are the best ever place for them, where they will be nurtured and grow into productive citizens. It is as simple as that.”
Paved or thorny: Malawi’s democratic path to 2014
RICHARD CHIROMBO
Intolerance. Dissent suppression. Intra-party bickering. Suppressed egos. Hero-worshipping. Thin, if any, ideological differences. Twisted principles.
It does not take long to define the subject: Malawi politics.
Since multiparty politics of government came back home in 1994, and got three more turns of ‘welcome-home-parties’ in 1999, 2004 and 2009, the country’s political scene has become well-dotted with political events, most of which predictable.
Malawians have come to expect a stillness of political egos in ruling parties, especially when the incumbent president is running for the first five years, while intra-party bickering has become part of the ‘norm’ in opposition parties- a way, perhaps, of passing political sleep away in the long-wait for Sanjika Palace or New State House.
Long-wait because no opposition party has ever won Presidential elections since 1994, save, perhaps, for the unique case of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Former United Democratic Front (UDF) National Publicity Secretary, Sam Mpasu, had one political adage he so loved to press home: people, he argued, form political parties to win the golden ticket into government. That is common sense.
But some special breed of people, Malawians to our credit, went into government in order to form a political party! That fascinated Mpasu so much- much the same way as it reinforced the established point that Malawi is a country of great inventors (the likes of Gabriel Kondesi, William Kamkwamba and, after 2004, the political inventor that is State President Bingu wa Mutharika, among others).
As some form of artificial tranquility prevails in ruling parties, the parties in question soon ‘forget’ the contentious issue of succession, leaving all sense of judgment to ‘time’, which, they always argue, ‘will tell’. The reason for letting succession dogs lie is often that, because the leaders won their maiden Presidential contest, they will do it (win) again.
That is the reason nobody bothered former president Bakili Muluzi, within the ranks and file of UDF between 1994 and 1999, on succession plans; a honeymoon that continued between 1999 and 2004 when it became apparently clear that, while the driver was still enjoying the feel of the highway and wanted to continue cruising beyond legal speed, the road in front was fast disappearing into some peculiar, dusty path.
Such leaders quickly grow bigger than their sponsoring parties and develop quick-fire anger even to friendly advice. The end, in our case, has been a disaster for intra-party democracy because leaders are imposed on political parties to satisfy the insatiable anger of the powers-that-be.
Just such a disaster happened in the UDF, a party that once wore ‘mighty’ armor during its time of glory. Because it had everything at its disposal in those ‘mighty’ days, the party wore the ‘heavy suit of prosperity’ to withstand even the most volatile of forces; now, it struggles in the great sea of near-obscurity that it has adopted the weight-light life saving jacket to survive the stormy waters.
Ironically, the same argument that offers first-time ruling parties artificial tranquility has the opposite effect on opposition parties. Because their leaders lost one election, other aspirants begin to fume, saying chances are that they (losers) will loose again. Once beaten, twice shy; twice beaten? The answer is what they dread.
That answer is what Malawi Congress Party (MCP) presidential aspirants never wanted to be the unfortunate part of between 1994 and 1999, too. First President, Ngwazi Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, fell against Muluzi in the 1994 race to Sanjika, and never sought to rise again.
He took the white flag to Mudi State Residence in Blantyre, where he went to stay after getting unceremoniously booted out of Sanjika Palace, but left the wooden post with the green lights to Gwanda Chakuamba- his vice presidential running-mate in the monumental polls.
John Zenus Ungapake Tembo, the ever-ambitious Dedza South Member of Parliament, was chosen MCP vice president. Political analysts saw them as the perfect example of a strange political pair, doubts that soon back-rode the horse of reality when time came to choose a presidential running mate.
Chakuamba, aware of Alliance for Democracy (Aford) president, Chakufwa Chihana’s, discontentment with the UDF administration, wanted to outsmart the ruling cadres by forging a working alliance with Aford. While common sense had it that Chihana gets the running mate slot, Tembo could have none of it.
Chakuamba and Chihana? These were strange bedfellows, too; more so because Chihana had fought gallantly against the one party regime, efforts that paid dividends at the ballot box. It was a common choral cord Chihana and the likes of Muluzi had touched, and they got their just desserts.
But politics is not a duvet you get into in the evening, and hope to still be there by sunrise: it is dynamic, and changes with the times. Chakuamba and Chihana got this wisdom quite well, and wanted to use it for a free tough lesson on the ‘big-headed’ UDF.
Because Tembo did not whole-heartedly support the two, the alliance- like the conflict it created- was not symmetrical. The space left between escalating disagreements in MCP, confusion over the ‘real’ MCP’s stand on Aford, and the ruling UDF’s campaign tactics was too small for the articulation of a viable alliance agenda.
To some extent, Tembo’s reluctance was an admission of the inadequacies of decision making in political parties, as well as the general lack of real grass roots’ representation in such processes. On this line of thinking, the alliance’s failure at the polls was a form of ‘voice’ for grass roots communities, a message that had no other form than ‘failure’.
All this happened some 11 years ago, and people expected new things and challenges. It has not been so, though, because, instead of taking the exciting political road replete with twists and turns, our politicians have chosen to take the straight road to the nearest elections. This is worrying Amunandife Mkumba, Malawi Democratic Union (MDU) president. When Malawians last saw Kamuzu on a presidential ballot box, Mkumba was there. He acknowledges being one of the most hopeful people then.
“After all, we had worked so hard to reach that level of going to the polls to choose the Head of state and government and Members of Parliament. Some of us risked our lives writing and distribution secret letters in the middle of night,” said Mkumba.
Now, after some 16 years of multiparty democracy, what does he say? Are we there?
“Not yet; we are still trying. It is all the same everywhere. Some democracies such as the US have come a long way. In fact, when people realize that some things have been predictable politically, it is a sign of political maturity,” said Mkumba.
MDU is one of the parties whose predictable pattern includes its dependence on alliances with relatively larger parties. Others include Malawi Democratic Party (MDP) of Kamlepo Kalua, Congress for National Unity, Peoples Patriotic Front, Peoples Progressive Movement, Maravi People’s Party, Malawi Forum for Unity in Development, among others.
“This has been one of the weaknesses in our democracy. We have far too many political parties it is difficult to understand their ideologies. That, too, has been one of the most predictable things: more political parties, little, if at all, differences in political ideologies,” said Edward Chaka, executive director for Peoples Federation for National Peace and Development (Pefenap).
Chaka said the country needed influential parties that worked on incorruptible principles, contrary to current trends where courageous politicians wither when caught up in a net of adverse circumstances. They also often drop into a vacuum of political objectives and offer no clear direction.
“We don’t need leaders who are always busy buying time in a world where there is no spare time. Each time, and thus election, is important; parties should be talking of making new in roads,” he said.
Others, like Institute for Policy Interaction executive director, Rafiq Hajat, and Human Rights Consultative Committee chairperson Undule Mwakasungula, feel that the road is partly paved and partly thorny.
The thorny area is that of political tolerance, both in ruling and opposition parties. The issue of suspension of three DPP parliamentarians for airing their constituents’ views on quota system of selection to public universities comes to the fore, so does the recent public fight of UDF supporters at Chileka Airport.
“Political parties need to embrace tolerance to dissenting views. We can then claim that we have come off age,” said Maurice Munthali, Public Affairs Committee publicity secretary.
The other thing winning politicians are likely to pursue is the arrest of perceived enemies. It started with Muluzi, when his administration arrested an ailing Banda. Now the UDF is crying foul, saying DPP is targeting its zealots on trumped up charges. Just who will be on the ‘crying list’ next is unknown, depends on who wins.
“Otherwise. Why is it that only those in opposition are in the wrong. People linked with government and the ruling party is spared,’ queried Friday Jumbe, interim UDF president.
But one thing is for sure. What US Senator John Tyler once said is true: “The man of today gives place to the man of tomorrow, and the idols which one worships, the next destroys.”
Suppression of dissent in ruling parties continues; political bickering and position tussling continues in opposition parties; small parties continue to wait for national elections to hatch the same, old idea of alliances; popular representation remains a fallacy; and, somewhere, handcuffs are waiting for the next politician.
Nothing really changes, although political commentators also agree that Malawi’s road to destination-democracy has been paved on elections’ conduct. Peace has been the buzzword, prompting others to suggestively joke that the country should replace tobacco for peace as the Number One forex earner.
But peace is never for sale. Regional voting patterns are also being dismasntled, a mature sign of unity in purpose, said Hajat.
So far, it has been a game of equal chances: thorns here, pavements there.
Taking the children ‘home’
RICHARD CHIROMBO
The street child’s life is rough and lonely.
They have wishes, hopes, passions, inclinations and secret dreams- but all these cannot alter the state of facts and evidence, which point to dread and gloom.
John Kaliveni, 12, was once a moving hope. He had decided, some seven years earlier, to grow up in his patrimonial home- Mtengo Village in the area of T/A Kalonga, Salima.
That was before his father, the last surviving parent of their family, died in August 2003. When death struck, he- four older brothers and a sister- entered into the shadows. Hope for quality education went with the winds of death. Their seemingly little world collapsed is sorrow and hopelessness. Today, some seven years later, life is yet to return to the basics.
John ‘stays’ in Blantyre, though he has nowhere to really call home.
“The most painful thing is that I don’t know where my brothers and sister are: They went to Lilongwe to look for alms in 2004, and I chose Blantyre. We have never met,” said Kaliveni.
During the afternoon of March 24 this year, LifeLine Southern Africa-Malawi chairperson, Mary Dzinyemba, watched Kaliveni gently set a mahogany box on dusty ground along Mudi River. He then opened the top end of the equally box, stuffed old newspaper clips, forming his idea of a mattress, and ducked in.
It is home for him; the boy who once had a home and enthusiasm, now replaced with perpetual fear of extreme weather conditions without, and the hunger within.
“It was such a sorry sight, yet these are our own children. The nation can do better,” said Dzinyemba.
LifeLine-Malawi is working with its mother body to establish toll-free lines for orphans, street and other vulnerable children. Dzinyemba said the initiative aims to give children suffering from various forms of abuse a life line.
“It’s about giving children facing abusive circumstances another chance; the chance to get out (of these problems),” said Dzinyemba.
However, it is not only LifeLine that is thinking in ‘second-chances’; government has now joined the fray.
It all started when Patricia Kaliati, Gender, Children and Community Development Minister, visited Chilwa Reformatory Centre in Zomba earlier this year. It is either she prepared to say what she did, or else she was prompted by circumstances.
“It is a pity that, while many other children go about in the streets of our cities and town assemblies, places abound in our reformatory centres. Our child reformatory centres are underutilized. This trend must change,’ said Kaliati.
So started the beginnings of a campaign to relocate street children to reformatory institutions by February, and Kaliati has been resolute.
Times come when the truth comes home to many, and people begin to think beyond the narrow isthmus of selfishness. This truth has come to her so many times, as most children at Mkando Trading Centre in Kaliati’s constituency testify.
They have more than a dozen times been the target of Kaliati’s charitable-self, receiving a wide range of goods including blankets, cooking oil, scholarships, and clothes, among others.
Now that she is responsible for all Malawian children as minister, the former teacher merely wants to make her love national; the combined love of a caring mother and professional teacher.
This truth has also come home for women such as Mary Woodworth, director for Mulanje-based Friends of Mulanje Orphans (FOMO). She lives in the United Kingdom, at least the physical form of her, her heart stays in Mulanje.
Like all winds, it started small for her, too. She married a British citizen, who invited her to Europe.
“The children (there) were, mainly, well dressed, well-fed, well-educated. Well-versed with matters of the world,” said Woodworth.
When she came back home for a breather around the year 2000, the truth came home for her right at the airport. Too many differences in infrastructure and technological advancements.
There was, also, the sorry sight of children on the streets of Blantyre. She thought the problem was only common in Blantyre and Lilongwe, but was shocked to find that the situation was similar in Mulanje, her home district.
“Even worse. The HIV and AIDS pandemic was breaking communities apart, challenges of poverty and resource constraints were clouding prospects for the future. There was also the issue of girls dropping out of school. Something had to be done, hence FOMO’s efforts,” said Woodworth, touched by the invisible hand of truth.
The children in Mulanje welcomed her, and her gesture; but Kaliati seems to be in trouble making her love ‘national’.
“Some street children have gone into hiding. Many are running away, and this is quiet surprising. How could people run away from assistance? The thing is, we will not stop mid-way through the road, we will look for them and go on with the exercise,” said Kaliati.
A tale of love gone bad. Can love really go ‘bad’?
“Yes, it does. Depending on the approach you adopt to solve a problem. After all, how can children run away from help? My submission is that the initiative is good, but has been hastily implemented,” said Kenwilliams Mhango, Country Director for African Network for the Prevention and Protection of Child Abuse and Neglect-Malawi Chapter.
Mhango said there was no need for short cuts. The Ministry of Gender, Children and Community Development would have carried out comprehensive publicity campaigns to rid the campaign of any huddles in understanding, invested heavily in reformatory centre infrastructure, and won civil society support.
Take, for instance, the issue of location. He says the way child reformatory centres are concentrated sends wrong signals about the existence of street children, and the challenges they face.
“Do we have a reformatory centre in the Northern region? No. Don’t we have street children there? We do,” Mhango answers his own questions.
Mhango blames short cuts for exacerbating the situation, saying most children would willingly offer themselves up to such “a positive, life-changing move’.
He had ready examples. Take, for instance, the issue of his organization’s name: African Network for the Prevention and Protection of Child Abuse and Neglect- Malawi Chapter. It is such a long name, a winding road.
“Many people have suggested that we adopt a short name. They say the name is too long. But we say, “No, there is no need for short cuts when the name explains everything well. We are comfortable with both the name and the length of the name’,” said Mhango.
The short of it all is that there are times shortcuts pay, but mostly they do not pay.
The issue of reformatory and protective services for children has a long history, though the story is younger than when human life begun. In ancient times, when might was right, children had no right to live, and could be disposed of with little compunction.
Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian during the late 1st Century B.C., bears witness that many people in that once great empire, including the Ceylonese, could discard of children perceived to have no courage or endurance. Such children, when not killed, rushed into streets and public places.
The Greeks did not want any physically challenged children to grow, also. Plato accepted this status quo and Aristotle recommended a law prohibiting parents from rearing physically challenged children, which led physician Soranus, a 2nd Century practitioner, to instruct midwives to examine each child at birth and get rid of those not fit.
In Egypt, on the other hand, parents who killed their children were merely sentenced to ‘hug’ the corpse continually for seventy-two hours, the punishers thinking that it was not fit those who gave life to the child to die, but that they should be punished in such a way as to create repentance and deter them from committing any such acts.
Children’s rights enjoyed secondary status to national interests, necessitating strategies to bail them out of such a quagmire.
During this very early period, Athens and Rome had orphan homes. The name brephotrophia (for these welfare centres) was mentioned in 529 in Justinian law, one of the most influential pieces of legislation. With the rise of Christianity, the church provided for foundlings and every village had a xenodochium- a hospice for pilgrims and the poor, which also embraced children without homes.
By the Sixth Century, the brephotrophium at Trier had a marble receptacle with which abandoned children could be safely deposited secretly. Similar institutions in France in the Seventh Century were the forerunners of the welfare system of the Nineteenth Century, with the establishment of the first such hospice by Datheus, the archpriest of Milan in 787.
In Mesopotamia, the strategy was different. Starting from 6000 years ago, orphans and vulnerable children had a goddess. Writer Rig Veda also mentions another deity among ancient Hindus who rescued vulnerable children and endowed them with legal rights to protection.
The gods reflected a mirror image of humanity, affording a picture of what went on among people, and how wrongs could be corrected. This was supplemented by more laws guaranteeing rights of the child to protection, and included the Laws of Solon in 600 B.C., which required army commanders to raise, at the expense of government, children of soldiers killed in battle.
Wives of Roman emperors, who initiated child welfare programmes, emulated this gesture. Around this same time, St. Nicholas Thaumaturgos- wonder worker of the 3rd Century, who was also Patron Saint of children and protector of the feeble minded- revolutionized the phenomenon of child welfare.
Main strategies of offering child protective services has consisted of placing children in government run institutions, private organisations or under foster care.
Russian and British law also initiated early involvement of government in public welfare, with the main reliance being on alms-houses where, to off set expense and save children from the ‘sin’ of idleness, children were forced to work, according to The Battered Child, a book tackling the issue of child abuse and neglect in the world.
However, child protective services have not been without blemish, and their impacts have continually been questioned. An1881German report on childcare services stated that 31 per cent of illegitimate children died under foster care, allegedly from natural causes (but really from freezing, starvation and deliberate destruction). The report discovered that foster care givers had ‘discovered’ that the best way of getting rid of the children was to give them nothing but pacifiers soaked in brandy!
This was negative, sure, but helped in making sure that the issue of childcare rose from a relatively obscure position to a matter of public and professional concern in the US in early 1960s.
In all these cases, there is no report of children escaping- as Malawi has come to learn.
Only that Kaliati never gives up, and has a clever way of summing things up: “We are all still learning from all this and, no matter how difficult it proves or long it takes, we will place these children home. Reformatory centres are the best ever place for them, where they will be nurtured and grow into productive citizens. It is as simple as that.”
Paved or thorny: Malawi’s democratic path to 2014
RICHARD CHIROMBO
Intolerance. Dissent suppression. Intra-party bickering. Suppressed egos. Hero-worshipping. Thin, if any, ideological differences. Twisted principles.
It does not take long to define the subject: Malawi politics.
Since multiparty politics of government came back home in 1994, and got three more turns of ‘welcome-home-parties’ in 1999, 2004 and 2009, the country’s political scene has become well-dotted with political events, most of which predictable.
Malawians have come to expect a stillness of political egos in ruling parties, especially when the incumbent president is running for the first five years, while intra-party bickering has become part of the ‘norm’ in opposition parties- a way, perhaps, of passing political sleep away in the long-wait for Sanjika Palace or New State House.
Long-wait because no opposition party has ever won Presidential elections since 1994, save, perhaps, for the unique case of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Former United Democratic Front (UDF) National Publicity Secretary, Sam Mpasu, had one political adage he so loved to press home: people, he argued, form political parties to win the golden ticket into government. That is common sense.
But some special breed of people, Malawians to our credit, went into government in order to form a political party! That fascinated Mpasu so much- much the same way as it reinforced the established point that Malawi is a country of great inventors (the likes of Gabriel Kondesi, William Kamkwamba and, after 2004, the political inventor that is State President Bingu wa Mutharika, among others).
As some form of artificial tranquility prevails in ruling parties, the parties in question soon ‘forget’ the contentious issue of succession, leaving all sense of judgment to ‘time’, which, they always argue, ‘will tell’. The reason for letting succession dogs lie is often that, because the leaders won their maiden Presidential contest, they will do it (win) again.
That is the reason nobody bothered former president Bakili Muluzi, within the ranks and file of UDF between 1994 and 1999, on succession plans; a honeymoon that continued between 1999 and 2004 when it became apparently clear that, while the driver was still enjoying the feel of the highway and wanted to continue cruising beyond legal speed, the road in front was fast disappearing into some peculiar, dusty path.
Such leaders quickly grow bigger than their sponsoring parties and develop quick-fire anger even to friendly advice. The end, in our case, has been a disaster for intra-party democracy because leaders are imposed on political parties to satisfy the insatiable anger of the powers-that-be.
Just such a disaster happened in the UDF, a party that once wore ‘mighty’ armor during its time of glory. Because it had everything at its disposal in those ‘mighty’ days, the party wore the ‘heavy suit of prosperity’ to withstand even the most volatile of forces; now, it struggles in the great sea of near-obscurity that it has adopted the weight-light life saving jacket to survive the stormy waters.
Ironically, the same argument that offers first-time ruling parties artificial tranquility has the opposite effect on opposition parties. Because their leaders lost one election, other aspirants begin to fume, saying chances are that they (losers) will loose again. Once beaten, twice shy; twice beaten? The answer is what they dread.
That answer is what Malawi Congress Party (MCP) presidential aspirants never wanted to be the unfortunate part of between 1994 and 1999, too. First President, Ngwazi Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, fell against Muluzi in the 1994 race to Sanjika, and never sought to rise again.
He took the white flag to Mudi State Residence in Blantyre, where he went to stay after getting unceremoniously booted out of Sanjika Palace, but left the wooden post with the green lights to Gwanda Chakuamba- his vice presidential running-mate in the monumental polls.
John Zenus Ungapake Tembo, the ever-ambitious Dedza South Member of Parliament, was chosen MCP vice president. Political analysts saw them as the perfect example of a strange political pair, doubts that soon back-rode the horse of reality when time came to choose a presidential running mate.
Chakuamba, aware of Alliance for Democracy (Aford) president, Chakufwa Chihana’s, discontentment with the UDF administration, wanted to outsmart the ruling cadres by forging a working alliance with Aford. While common sense had it that Chihana gets the running mate slot, Tembo could have none of it.
Chakuamba and Chihana? These were strange bedfellows, too; more so because Chihana had fought gallantly against the one party regime, efforts that paid dividends at the ballot box. It was a common choral cord Chihana and the likes of Muluzi had touched, and they got their just desserts.
But politics is not a duvet you get into in the evening, and hope to still be there by sunrise: it is dynamic, and changes with the times. Chakuamba and Chihana got this wisdom quite well, and wanted to use it for a free tough lesson on the ‘big-headed’ UDF.
Because Tembo did not whole-heartedly support the two, the alliance- like the conflict it created- was not symmetrical. The space left between escalating disagreements in MCP, confusion over the ‘real’ MCP’s stand on Aford, and the ruling UDF’s campaign tactics was too small for the articulation of a viable alliance agenda.
To some extent, Tembo’s reluctance was an admission of the inadequacies of decision making in political parties, as well as the general lack of real grass roots’ representation in such processes. On this line of thinking, the alliance’s failure at the polls was a form of ‘voice’ for grass roots communities, a message that had no other form than ‘failure’.
All this happened some 11 years ago, and people expected new things and challenges. It has not been so, though, because, instead of taking the exciting political road replete with twists and turns, our politicians have chosen to take the straight road to the nearest elections. This is worrying Amunandife Mkumba, Malawi Democratic Union (MDU) president. When Malawians last saw Kamuzu on a presidential ballot box, Mkumba was there. He acknowledges being one of the most hopeful people then.
“After all, we had worked so hard to reach that level of going to the polls to choose the Head of state and government and Members of Parliament. Some of us risked our lives writing and distribution secret letters in the middle of night,” said Mkumba.
Now, after some 16 years of multiparty democracy, what does he say? Are we there?
“Not yet; we are still trying. It is all the same everywhere. Some democracies such as the US have come a long way. In fact, when people realize that some things have been predictable politically, it is a sign of political maturity,” said Mkumba.
MDU is one of the parties whose predictable pattern includes its dependence on alliances with relatively larger parties. Others include Malawi Democratic Party (MDP) of Kamlepo Kalua, Congress for National Unity, Peoples Patriotic Front, Peoples Progressive Movement, Maravi People’s Party, Malawi Forum for Unity in Development, among others.
“This has been one of the weaknesses in our democracy. We have far too many political parties it is difficult to understand their ideologies. That, too, has been one of the most predictable things: more political parties, little, if at all, differences in political ideologies,” said Edward Chaka, executive director for Peoples Federation for National Peace and Development (Pefenap).
Chaka said the country needed influential parties that worked on incorruptible principles, contrary to current trends where courageous politicians wither when caught up in a net of adverse circumstances. They also often drop into a vacuum of political objectives and offer no clear direction.
“We don’t need leaders who are always busy buying time in a world where there is no spare time. Each time, and thus election, is important; parties should be talking of making new in roads,” he said.
Others, like Institute for Policy Interaction executive director, Rafiq Hajat, and Human Rights Consultative Committee chairperson Undule Mwakasungula, feel that the road is partly paved and partly thorny.
The thorny area is that of political tolerance, both in ruling and opposition parties. The issue of suspension of three DPP parliamentarians for airing their constituents’ views on quota system of selection to public universities comes to the fore, so does the recent public fight of UDF supporters at Chileka Airport.
“Political parties need to embrace tolerance to dissenting views. We can then claim that we have come off age,” said Maurice Munthali, Public Affairs Committee publicity secretary.
The other thing winning politicians are likely to pursue is the arrest of perceived enemies. It started with Muluzi, when his administration arrested an ailing Banda. Now the UDF is crying foul, saying DPP is targeting its zealots on trumped up charges. Just who will be on the ‘crying list’ next is unknown, depends on who wins.
“Otherwise. Why is it that only those in opposition are in the wrong. People linked with government and the ruling party is spared,’ queried Friday Jumbe, interim UDF president.
But one thing is for sure. What US Senator John Tyler once said is true: “The man of today gives place to the man of tomorrow, and the idols which one worships, the next destroys.”
Suppression of dissent in ruling parties continues; political bickering and position tussling continues in opposition parties; small parties continue to wait for national elections to hatch the same, old idea of alliances; popular representation remains a fallacy; and, somewhere, handcuffs are waiting for the next politician.
Nothing really changes, although political commentators also agree that Malawi’s road to destination-democracy has been paved on elections’ conduct. Peace has been the buzzword, prompting others to suggestively joke that the country should replace tobacco for peace as the Number One forex earner.
But peace is never for sale. Regional voting patterns are also being dismasntled, a mature sign of unity in purpose, said Hajat.
So far, it has been a game of equal chances: thorns here, pavements there.
Taking the children ‘home’
RICHARD CHIROMBO
The street child’s life is rough and lonely.
They have wishes, hopes, passions, inclinations and secret dreams- but all these cannot alter the state of facts and evidence, which point to dread and gloom.
John Kaliveni, 12, was once a moving hope. He had decided, some seven years earlier, to grow up in his patrimonial home- Mtengo Village in the area of T/A Kalonga, Salima.
That was before his father, the last surviving parent of their family, died in August 2003. When death struck, he- four older brothers and a sister- entered into the shadows. Hope for quality education went with the winds of death. Their seemingly little world collapsed is sorrow and hopelessness. Today, some seven years later, life is yet to return to the basics.
John ‘stays’ in Blantyre, though he has nowhere to really call home.
“The most painful thing is that I don’t know where my brothers and sister are: They went to Lilongwe to look for alms in 2004, and I chose Blantyre. We have never met,” said Kaliveni.
During the afternoon of March 24 this year, LifeLine Southern Africa-Malawi chairperson, Mary Dzinyemba, watched Kaliveni gently set a mahogany box on dusty ground along Mudi River. He then opened the top end of the equally box, stuffed old newspaper clips, forming his idea of a mattress, and ducked in.
It is home for him; the boy who once had a home and enthusiasm, now replaced with perpetual fear of extreme weather conditions without, and the hunger within.
“It was such a sorry sight, yet these are our own children. The nation can do better,” said Dzinyemba.
LifeLine-Malawi is working with its mother body to establish toll-free lines for orphans, street and other vulnerable children. Dzinyemba said the initiative aims to give children suffering from various forms of abuse a life line.
“It’s about giving children facing abusive circumstances another chance; the chance to get out (of these problems),” said Dzinyemba.
However, it is not only LifeLine that is thinking in ‘second-chances’; government has now joined the fray.
It all started when Patricia Kaliati, Gender, Children and Community Development Minister, visited Chilwa Reformatory Centre in Zomba earlier this year. It is either she prepared to say what she did, or else she was prompted by circumstances.
“It is a pity that, while many other children go about in the streets of our cities and town assemblies, places abound in our reformatory centres. Our child reformatory centres are underutilized. This trend must change,’ said Kaliati.
So started the beginnings of a campaign to relocate street children to reformatory institutions by February, and Kaliati has been resolute.
Times come when the truth comes home to many, and people begin to think beyond the narrow isthmus of selfishness. This truth has come to her so many times, as most children at Mkando Trading Centre in Kaliati’s constituency testify.
They have more than a dozen times been the target of Kaliati’s charitable-self, receiving a wide range of goods including blankets, cooking oil, scholarships, and clothes, among others.
Now that she is responsible for all Malawian children as minister, the former teacher merely wants to make her love national; the combined love of a caring mother and professional teacher.
This truth has also come home for women such as Mary Woodworth, director for Mulanje-based Friends of Mulanje Orphans (FOMO). She lives in the United Kingdom, at least the physical form of her, her heart stays in Mulanje.
Like all winds, it started small for her, too. She married a British citizen, who invited her to Europe.
“The children (there) were, mainly, well dressed, well-fed, well-educated. Well-versed with matters of the world,” said Woodworth.
When she came back home for a breather around the year 2000, the truth came home for her right at the airport. Too many differences in infrastructure and technological advancements.
There was, also, the sorry sight of children on the streets of Blantyre. She thought the problem was only common in Blantyre and Lilongwe, but was shocked to find that the situation was similar in Mulanje, her home district.
“Even worse. The HIV and AIDS pandemic was breaking communities apart, challenges of poverty and resource constraints were clouding prospects for the future. There was also the issue of girls dropping out of school. Something had to be done, hence FOMO’s efforts,” said Woodworth, touched by the invisible hand of truth.
The children in Mulanje welcomed her, and her gesture; but Kaliati seems to be in trouble making her love ‘national’.
“Some street children have gone into hiding. Many are running away, and this is quiet surprising. How could people run away from assistance? The thing is, we will not stop mid-way through the road, we will look for them and go on with the exercise,” said Kaliati.
A tale of love gone bad. Can love really go ‘bad’?
“Yes, it does. Depending on the approach you adopt to solve a problem. After all, how can children run away from help? My submission is that the initiative is good, but has been hastily implemented,” said Kenwilliams Mhango, Country Director for African Network for the Prevention and Protection of Child Abuse and Neglect-Malawi Chapter.
Mhango said there was no need for short cuts. The Ministry of Gender, Children and Community Development would have carried out comprehensive publicity campaigns to rid the campaign of any huddles in understanding, invested heavily in reformatory centre infrastructure, and won civil society support.
Take, for instance, the issue of location. He says the way child reformatory centres are concentrated sends wrong signals about the existence of street children, and the challenges they face.
“Do we have a reformatory centre in the Northern region? No. Don’t we have street children there? We do,” Mhango answers his own questions.
Mhango blames short cuts for exacerbating the situation, saying most children would willingly offer themselves up to such “a positive, life-changing move’.
He had ready examples. Take, for instance, the issue of his organization’s name: African Network for the Prevention and Protection of Child Abuse and Neglect- Malawi Chapter. It is such a long name, a winding road.
“Many people have suggested that we adopt a short name. They say the name is too long. But we say, “No, there is no need for short cuts when the name explains everything well. We are comfortable with both the name and the length of the name’,” said Mhango.
The short of it all is that there are times shortcuts pay, but mostly they do not pay.
The issue of reformatory and protective services for children has a long history, though the story is younger than when human life begun. In ancient times, when might was right, children had no right to live, and could be disposed of with little compunction.
Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian during the late 1st Century B.C., bears witness that many people in that once great empire, including the Ceylonese, could discard of children perceived to have no courage or endurance. Such children, when not killed, rushed into streets and public places.
The Greeks did not want any physically challenged children to grow, also. Plato accepted this status quo and Aristotle recommended a law prohibiting parents from rearing physically challenged children, which led physician Soranus, a 2nd Century practitioner, to instruct midwives to examine each child at birth and get rid of those not fit.
In Egypt, on the other hand, parents who killed their children were merely sentenced to ‘hug’ the corpse continually for seventy-two hours, the punishers thinking that it was not fit those who gave life to the child to die, but that they should be punished in such a way as to create repentance and deter them from committing any such acts.
Children’s rights enjoyed secondary status to national interests, necessitating strategies to bail them out of such a quagmire.
During this very early period, Athens and Rome had orphan homes. The name brephotrophia (for these welfare centres) was mentioned in 529 in Justinian law, one of the most influential pieces of legislation. With the rise of Christianity, the church provided for foundlings and every village had a xenodochium- a hospice for pilgrims and the poor, which also embraced children without homes.
By the Sixth Century, the brephotrophium at Trier had a marble receptacle with which abandoned children could be safely deposited secretly. Similar institutions in France in the Seventh Century were the forerunners of the welfare system of the Nineteenth Century, with the establishment of the first such hospice by Datheus, the archpriest of Milan in 787.
In Mesopotamia, the strategy was different. Starting from 6000 years ago, orphans and vulnerable children had a goddess. Writer Rig Veda also mentions another deity among ancient Hindus who rescued vulnerable children and endowed them with legal rights to protection.
The gods reflected a mirror image of humanity, affording a picture of what went on among people, and how wrongs could be corrected. This was supplemented by more laws guaranteeing rights of the child to protection, and included the Laws of Solon in 600 B.C., which required army commanders to raise, at the expense of government, children of soldiers killed in battle.
Wives of Roman emperors, who initiated child welfare programmes, emulated this gesture. Around this same time, St. Nicholas Thaumaturgos- wonder worker of the 3rd Century, who was also Patron Saint of children and protector of the feeble minded- revolutionized the phenomenon of child welfare.
Main strategies of offering child protective services has consisted of placing children in government run institutions, private organisations or under foster care.
Russian and British law also initiated early involvement of government in public welfare, with the main reliance being on alms-houses where, to off set expense and save children from the ‘sin’ of idleness, children were forced to work, according to The Battered Child, a book tackling the issue of child abuse and neglect in the world.
However, child protective services have not been without blemish, and their impacts have continually been questioned. An1881German report on childcare services stated that 31 per cent of illegitimate children died under foster care, allegedly from natural causes (but really from freezing, starvation and deliberate destruction). The report discovered that foster care givers had ‘discovered’ that the best way of getting rid of the children was to give them nothing but pacifiers soaked in brandy!
This was negative, sure, but helped in making sure that the issue of childcare rose from a relatively obscure position to a matter of public and professional concern in the US in early 1960s.
In all these cases, there is no report of children escaping- as Malawi has come to learn.
Only that Kaliati never gives up, and has a clever way of summing things up: “We are all still learning from all this and, no matter how difficult it proves or long it takes, we will place these children home. Reformatory centres are the best ever place for them, where they will be nurtured and grow into productive citizens. It is as simple as that.”
Paved or thorny: Malawi’s democratic path to 2014
RICHARD CHIROMBO
Intolerance. Dissent suppression. Intra-party bickering. Suppressed egos. Hero-worshipping. Thin, if any, ideological differences. Twisted principles.
It does not take long to define the subject: Malawi politics.
Since multiparty politics of government came back home in 1994, and got three more turns of ‘welcome-home-parties’ in 1999, 2004 and 2009, the country’s political scene has become well-dotted with political events, most of which predictable.
Malawians have come to expect a stillness of political egos in ruling parties, especially when the incumbent president is running for the first five years, while intra-party bickering has become part of the ‘norm’ in opposition parties- a way, perhaps, of passing political sleep away in the long-wait for Sanjika Palace or New State House.
Long-wait because no opposition party has ever won Presidential elections since 1994, save, perhaps, for the unique case of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Former United Democratic Front (UDF) National Publicity Secretary, Sam Mpasu, had one political adage he so loved to press home: people, he argued, form political parties to win the golden ticket into government. That is common sense.
But some special breed of people, Malawians to our credit, went into government in order to form a political party! That fascinated Mpasu so much- much the same way as it reinforced the established point that Malawi is a country of great inventors (the likes of Gabriel Kondesi, William Kamkwamba and, after 2004, the political inventor that is State President Bingu wa Mutharika, among others).
As some form of artificial tranquility prevails in ruling parties, the parties in question soon ‘forget’ the contentious issue of succession, leaving all sense of judgment to ‘time’, which, they always argue, ‘will tell’. The reason for letting succession dogs lie is often that, because the leaders won their maiden Presidential contest, they will do it (win) again.
That is the reason nobody bothered former president Bakili Muluzi, within the ranks and file of UDF between 1994 and 1999, on succession plans; a honeymoon that continued between 1999 and 2004 when it became apparently clear that, while the driver was still enjoying the feel of the highway and wanted to continue cruising beyond legal speed, the road in front was fast disappearing into some peculiar, dusty path.
Such leaders quickly grow bigger than their sponsoring parties and develop quick-fire anger even to friendly advice. The end, in our case, has been a disaster for intra-party democracy because leaders are imposed on political parties to satisfy the insatiable anger of the powers-that-be.
Just such a disaster happened in the UDF, a party that once wore ‘mighty’ armor during its time of glory. Because it had everything at its disposal in those ‘mighty’ days, the party wore the ‘heavy suit of prosperity’ to withstand even the most volatile of forces; now, it struggles in the great sea of near-obscurity that it has adopted the weight-light life saving jacket to survive the stormy waters.
Ironically, the same argument that offers first-time ruling parties artificial tranquility has the opposite effect on opposition parties. Because their leaders lost one election, other aspirants begin to fume, saying chances are that they (losers) will loose again. Once beaten, twice shy; twice beaten? The answer is what they dread.
That answer is what Malawi Congress Party (MCP) presidential aspirants never wanted to be the unfortunate part of between 1994 and 1999, too. First President, Ngwazi Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, fell against Muluzi in the 1994 race to Sanjika, and never sought to rise again.
He took the white flag to Mudi State Residence in Blantyre, where he went to stay after getting unceremoniously booted out of Sanjika Palace, but left the wooden post with the green lights to Gwanda Chakuamba- his vice presidential running-mate in the monumental polls.
John Zenus Ungapake Tembo, the ever-ambitious Dedza South Member of Parliament, was chosen MCP vice president. Political analysts saw them as the perfect example of a strange political pair, doubts that soon back-rode the horse of reality when time came to choose a presidential running mate.
Chakuamba, aware of Alliance for Democracy (Aford) president, Chakufwa Chihana’s, discontentment with the UDF administration, wanted to outsmart the ruling cadres by forging a working alliance with Aford. While common sense had it that Chihana gets the running mate slot, Tembo could have none of it.
Chakuamba and Chihana? These were strange bedfellows, too; more so because Chihana had fought gallantly against the one party regime, efforts that paid dividends at the ballot box. It was a common choral cord Chihana and the likes of Muluzi had touched, and they got their just desserts.
But politics is not a duvet you get into in the evening, and hope to still be there by sunrise: it is dynamic, and changes with the times. Chakuamba and Chihana got this wisdom quite well, and wanted to use it for a free tough lesson on the ‘big-headed’ UDF.
Because Tembo did not whole-heartedly support the two, the alliance- like the conflict it created- was not symmetrical. The space left between escalating disagreements in MCP, confusion over the ‘real’ MCP’s stand on Aford, and the ruling UDF’s campaign tactics was too small for the articulation of a viable alliance agenda.
To some extent, Tembo’s reluctance was an admission of the inadequacies of decision making in political parties, as well as the general lack of real grass roots’ representation in such processes. On this line of thinking, the alliance’s failure at the polls was a form of ‘voice’ for grass roots communities, a message that had no other form than ‘failure’.
All this happened some 11 years ago, and people expected new things and challenges. It has not been so, though, because, instead of taking the exciting political road replete with twists and turns, our politicians have chosen to take the straight road to the nearest elections. This is worrying Amunandife Mkumba, Malawi Democratic Union (MDU) president. When Malawians last saw Kamuzu on a presidential ballot box, Mkumba was there. He acknowledges being one of the most hopeful people then.
“After all, we had worked so hard to reach that level of going to the polls to choose the Head of state and government and Members of Parliament. Some of us risked our lives writing and distribution secret letters in the middle of night,” said Mkumba.
Now, after some 16 years of multiparty democracy, what does he say? Are we there?
“Not yet; we are still trying. It is all the same everywhere. Some democracies such as the US have come a long way. In fact, when people realize that some things have been predictable politically, it is a sign of political maturity,” said Mkumba.
MDU is one of the parties whose predictable pattern includes its dependence on alliances with relatively larger parties. Others include Malawi Democratic Party (MDP) of Kamlepo Kalua, Congress for National Unity, Peoples Patriotic Front, Peoples Progressive Movement, Maravi People’s Party, Malawi Forum for Unity in Development, among others.
“This has been one of the weaknesses in our democracy. We have far too many political parties it is difficult to understand their ideologies. That, too, has been one of the most predictable things: more political parties, little, if at all, differences in political ideologies,” said Edward Chaka, executive director for Peoples Federation for National Peace and Development (Pefenap).
Chaka said the country needed influential parties that worked on incorruptible principles, contrary to current trends where courageous politicians wither when caught up in a net of adverse circumstances. They also often drop into a vacuum of political objectives and offer no clear direction.
“We don’t need leaders who are always busy buying time in a world where there is no spare time. Each time, and thus election, is important; parties should be talking of making new in roads,” he said.
Others, like Institute for Policy Interaction executive director, Rafiq Hajat, and Human Rights Consultative Committee chairperson Undule Mwakasungula, feel that the road is partly paved and partly thorny.
The thorny area is that of political tolerance, both in ruling and opposition parties. The issue of suspension of three DPP parliamentarians for airing their constituents’ views on quota system of selection to public universities comes to the fore, so does the recent public fight of UDF supporters at Chileka Airport.
“Political parties need to embrace tolerance to dissenting views. We can then claim that we have come off age,” said Maurice Munthali, Public Affairs Committee publicity secretary.
The other thing winning politicians are likely to pursue is the arrest of perceived enemies. It started with Muluzi, when his administration arrested an ailing Banda. Now the UDF is crying foul, saying DPP is targeting its zealots on trumped up charges. Just who will be on the ‘crying list’ next is unknown, depends on who wins.
“Otherwise. Why is it that only those in opposition are in the wrong. People linked with government and the ruling party is spared,’ queried Friday Jumbe, interim UDF president.
But one thing is for sure. What US Senator John Tyler once said is true: “The man of today gives place to the man of tomorrow, and the idols which one worships, the next destroys.”
Suppression of dissent in ruling parties continues; political bickering and position tussling continues in opposition parties; small parties continue to wait for national elections to hatch the same, old idea of alliances; popular representation remains a fallacy; and, somewhere, handcuffs are waiting for the next politician.
Nothing really changes, although political commentators also agree that Malawi’s road to destination-democracy has been paved on elections’ conduct. Peace has been the buzzword, prompting others to suggestively joke that the country should replace tobacco for peace as the Number One forex earner.
But peace is never for sale. Regional voting patterns are also being dismasntled, a mature sign of unity in purpose, said Hajat.
So far, it has been a game of equal chances: thorns here, pavements there.
RICHARD CHIROMBO
The street child’s life is rough and lonely.
They have wishes, hopes, passions, inclinations and secret dreams- but all these cannot alter the state of facts and evidence, which point to dread and gloom.
John Kaliveni, 12, was once a moving hope. He had decided, some seven years earlier, to grow up in his patrimonial home- Mtengo Village in the area of T/A Kalonga, Salima.
That was before his father, the last surviving parent of their family, died in August 2003. When death struck, he- four older brothers and a sister- entered into the shadows. Hope for quality education went with the winds of death. Their seemingly little world collapsed is sorrow and hopelessness. Today, some seven years later, life is yet to return to the basics.
John ‘stays’ in Blantyre, though he has nowhere to really call home.
“The most painful thing is that I don’t know where my brothers and sister are: They went to Lilongwe to look for alms in 2004, and I chose Blantyre. We have never met,” said Kaliveni.
During the afternoon of March 24 this year, LifeLine Southern Africa-Malawi chairperson, Mary Dzinyemba, watched Kaliveni gently set a mahogany box on dusty ground along Mudi River. He then opened the top end of the equally box, stuffed old newspaper clips, forming his idea of a mattress, and ducked in.
It is home for him; the boy who once had a home and enthusiasm, now replaced with perpetual fear of extreme weather conditions without, and the hunger within.
“It was such a sorry sight, yet these are our own children. The nation can do better,” said Dzinyemba.
LifeLine-Malawi is working with its mother body to establish toll-free lines for orphans, street and other vulnerable children. Dzinyemba said the initiative aims to give children suffering from various forms of abuse a life line.
“It’s about giving children facing abusive circumstances another chance; the chance to get out (of these problems),” said Dzinyemba.
However, it is not only LifeLine that is thinking in ‘second-chances’; government has now joined the fray.
It all started when Patricia Kaliati, Gender, Children and Community Development Minister, visited Chilwa Reformatory Centre in Zomba earlier this year. It is either she prepared to say what she did, or else she was prompted by circumstances.
“It is a pity that, while many other children go about in the streets of our cities and town assemblies, places abound in our reformatory centres. Our child reformatory centres are underutilized. This trend must change,’ said Kaliati.
So started the beginnings of a campaign to relocate street children to reformatory institutions by February, and Kaliati has been resolute.
Times come when the truth comes home to many, and people begin to think beyond the narrow isthmus of selfishness. This truth has come to her so many times, as most children at Mkando Trading Centre in Kaliati’s constituency testify.
They have more than a dozen times been the target of Kaliati’s charitable-self, receiving a wide range of goods including blankets, cooking oil, scholarships, and clothes, among others.
Now that she is responsible for all Malawian children as minister, the former teacher merely wants to make her love national; the combined love of a caring mother and professional teacher.
This truth has also come home for women such as Mary Woodworth, director for Mulanje-based Friends of Mulanje Orphans (FOMO). She lives in the United Kingdom, at least the physical form of her, her heart stays in Mulanje.
Like all winds, it started small for her, too. She married a British citizen, who invited her to Europe.
“The children (there) were, mainly, well dressed, well-fed, well-educated. Well-versed with matters of the world,” said Woodworth.
When she came back home for a breather around the year 2000, the truth came home for her right at the airport. Too many differences in infrastructure and technological advancements.
There was, also, the sorry sight of children on the streets of Blantyre. She thought the problem was only common in Blantyre and Lilongwe, but was shocked to find that the situation was similar in Mulanje, her home district.
“Even worse. The HIV and AIDS pandemic was breaking communities apart, challenges of poverty and resource constraints were clouding prospects for the future. There was also the issue of girls dropping out of school. Something had to be done, hence FOMO’s efforts,” said Woodworth, touched by the invisible hand of truth.
The children in Mulanje welcomed her, and her gesture; but Kaliati seems to be in trouble making her love ‘national’.
“Some street children have gone into hiding. Many are running away, and this is quiet surprising. How could people run away from assistance? The thing is, we will not stop mid-way through the road, we will look for them and go on with the exercise,” said Kaliati.
A tale of love gone bad. Can love really go ‘bad’?
“Yes, it does. Depending on the approach you adopt to solve a problem. After all, how can children run away from help? My submission is that the initiative is good, but has been hastily implemented,” said Kenwilliams Mhango, Country Director for African Network for the Prevention and Protection of Child Abuse and Neglect-Malawi Chapter.
Mhango said there was no need for short cuts. The Ministry of Gender, Children and Community Development would have carried out comprehensive publicity campaigns to rid the campaign of any huddles in understanding, invested heavily in reformatory centre infrastructure, and won civil society support.
Take, for instance, the issue of location. He says the way child reformatory centres are concentrated sends wrong signals about the existence of street children, and the challenges they face.
“Do we have a reformatory centre in the Northern region? No. Don’t we have street children there? We do,” Mhango answers his own questions.
Mhango blames short cuts for exacerbating the situation, saying most children would willingly offer themselves up to such “a positive, life-changing move’.
He had ready examples. Take, for instance, the issue of his organization’s name: African Network for the Prevention and Protection of Child Abuse and Neglect- Malawi Chapter. It is such a long name, a winding road.
“Many people have suggested that we adopt a short name. They say the name is too long. But we say, “No, there is no need for short cuts when the name explains everything well. We are comfortable with both the name and the length of the name’,” said Mhango.
The short of it all is that there are times shortcuts pay, but mostly they do not pay.
The issue of reformatory and protective services for children has a long history, though the story is younger than when human life begun. In ancient times, when might was right, children had no right to live, and could be disposed of with little compunction.
Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian during the late 1st Century B.C., bears witness that many people in that once great empire, including the Ceylonese, could discard of children perceived to have no courage or endurance. Such children, when not killed, rushed into streets and public places.
The Greeks did not want any physically challenged children to grow, also. Plato accepted this status quo and Aristotle recommended a law prohibiting parents from rearing physically challenged children, which led physician Soranus, a 2nd Century practitioner, to instruct midwives to examine each child at birth and get rid of those not fit.
In Egypt, on the other hand, parents who killed their children were merely sentenced to ‘hug’ the corpse continually for seventy-two hours, the punishers thinking that it was not fit those who gave life to the child to die, but that they should be punished in such a way as to create repentance and deter them from committing any such acts.
Children’s rights enjoyed secondary status to national interests, necessitating strategies to bail them out of such a quagmire.
During this very early period, Athens and Rome had orphan homes. The name brephotrophia (for these welfare centres) was mentioned in 529 in Justinian law, one of the most influential pieces of legislation. With the rise of Christianity, the church provided for foundlings and every village had a xenodochium- a hospice for pilgrims and the poor, which also embraced children without homes.
By the Sixth Century, the brephotrophium at Trier had a marble receptacle with which abandoned children could be safely deposited secretly. Similar institutions in France in the Seventh Century were the forerunners of the welfare system of the Nineteenth Century, with the establishment of the first such hospice by Datheus, the archpriest of Milan in 787.
In Mesopotamia, the strategy was different. Starting from 6000 years ago, orphans and vulnerable children had a goddess. Writer Rig Veda also mentions another deity among ancient Hindus who rescued vulnerable children and endowed them with legal rights to protection.
The gods reflected a mirror image of humanity, affording a picture of what went on among people, and how wrongs could be corrected. This was supplemented by more laws guaranteeing rights of the child to protection, and included the Laws of Solon in 600 B.C., which required army commanders to raise, at the expense of government, children of soldiers killed in battle.
Wives of Roman emperors, who initiated child welfare programmes, emulated this gesture. Around this same time, St. Nicholas Thaumaturgos- wonder worker of the 3rd Century, who was also Patron Saint of children and protector of the feeble minded- revolutionized the phenomenon of child welfare.
Main strategies of offering child protective services has consisted of placing children in government run institutions, private organisations or under foster care.
Russian and British law also initiated early involvement of government in public welfare, with the main reliance being on alms-houses where, to off set expense and save children from the ‘sin’ of idleness, children were forced to work, according to The Battered Child, a book tackling the issue of child abuse and neglect in the world.
However, child protective services have not been without blemish, and their impacts have continually been questioned. An1881German report on childcare services stated that 31 per cent of illegitimate children died under foster care, allegedly from natural causes (but really from freezing, starvation and deliberate destruction). The report discovered that foster care givers had ‘discovered’ that the best way of getting rid of the children was to give them nothing but pacifiers soaked in brandy!
This was negative, sure, but helped in making sure that the issue of childcare rose from a relatively obscure position to a matter of public and professional concern in the US in early 1960s.
In all these cases, there is no report of children escaping- as Malawi has come to learn.
Only that Kaliati never gives up, and has a clever way of summing things up: “We are all still learning from all this and, no matter how difficult it proves or long it takes, we will place these children home. Reformatory centres are the best ever place for them, where they will be nurtured and grow into productive citizens. It is as simple as that.”
Paved or thorny: Malawi’s democratic path to 2014
RICHARD CHIROMBO
Intolerance. Dissent suppression. Intra-party bickering. Suppressed egos. Hero-worshipping. Thin, if any, ideological differences. Twisted principles.
It does not take long to define the subject: Malawi politics.
Since multiparty politics of government came back home in 1994, and got three more turns of ‘welcome-home-parties’ in 1999, 2004 and 2009, the country’s political scene has become well-dotted with political events, most of which predictable.
Malawians have come to expect a stillness of political egos in ruling parties, especially when the incumbent president is running for the first five years, while intra-party bickering has become part of the ‘norm’ in opposition parties- a way, perhaps, of passing political sleep away in the long-wait for Sanjika Palace or New State House.
Long-wait because no opposition party has ever won Presidential elections since 1994, save, perhaps, for the unique case of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Former United Democratic Front (UDF) National Publicity Secretary, Sam Mpasu, had one political adage he so loved to press home: people, he argued, form political parties to win the golden ticket into government. That is common sense.
But some special breed of people, Malawians to our credit, went into government in order to form a political party! That fascinated Mpasu so much- much the same way as it reinforced the established point that Malawi is a country of great inventors (the likes of Gabriel Kondesi, William Kamkwamba and, after 2004, the political inventor that is State President Bingu wa Mutharika, among others).
As some form of artificial tranquility prevails in ruling parties, the parties in question soon ‘forget’ the contentious issue of succession, leaving all sense of judgment to ‘time’, which, they always argue, ‘will tell’. The reason for letting succession dogs lie is often that, because the leaders won their maiden Presidential contest, they will do it (win) again.
That is the reason nobody bothered former president Bakili Muluzi, within the ranks and file of UDF between 1994 and 1999, on succession plans; a honeymoon that continued between 1999 and 2004 when it became apparently clear that, while the driver was still enjoying the feel of the highway and wanted to continue cruising beyond legal speed, the road in front was fast disappearing into some peculiar, dusty path.
Such leaders quickly grow bigger than their sponsoring parties and develop quick-fire anger even to friendly advice. The end, in our case, has been a disaster for intra-party democracy because leaders are imposed on political parties to satisfy the insatiable anger of the powers-that-be.
Just such a disaster happened in the UDF, a party that once wore ‘mighty’ armor during its time of glory. Because it had everything at its disposal in those ‘mighty’ days, the party wore the ‘heavy suit of prosperity’ to withstand even the most volatile of forces; now, it struggles in the great sea of near-obscurity that it has adopted the weight-light life saving jacket to survive the stormy waters.
Ironically, the same argument that offers first-time ruling parties artificial tranquility has the opposite effect on opposition parties. Because their leaders lost one election, other aspirants begin to fume, saying chances are that they (losers) will loose again. Once beaten, twice shy; twice beaten? The answer is what they dread.
That answer is what Malawi Congress Party (MCP) presidential aspirants never wanted to be the unfortunate part of between 1994 and 1999, too. First President, Ngwazi Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, fell against Muluzi in the 1994 race to Sanjika, and never sought to rise again.
He took the white flag to Mudi State Residence in Blantyre, where he went to stay after getting unceremoniously booted out of Sanjika Palace, but left the wooden post with the green lights to Gwanda Chakuamba- his vice presidential running-mate in the monumental polls.
John Zenus Ungapake Tembo, the ever-ambitious Dedza South Member of Parliament, was chosen MCP vice president. Political analysts saw them as the perfect example of a strange political pair, doubts that soon back-rode the horse of reality when time came to choose a presidential running mate.
Chakuamba, aware of Alliance for Democracy (Aford) president, Chakufwa Chihana’s, discontentment with the UDF administration, wanted to outsmart the ruling cadres by forging a working alliance with Aford. While common sense had it that Chihana gets the running mate slot, Tembo could have none of it.
Chakuamba and Chihana? These were strange bedfellows, too; more so because Chihana had fought gallantly against the one party regime, efforts that paid dividends at the ballot box. It was a common choral cord Chihana and the likes of Muluzi had touched, and they got their just desserts.
But politics is not a duvet you get into in the evening, and hope to still be there by sunrise: it is dynamic, and changes with the times. Chakuamba and Chihana got this wisdom quite well, and wanted to use it for a free tough lesson on the ‘big-headed’ UDF.
Because Tembo did not whole-heartedly support the two, the alliance- like the conflict it created- was not symmetrical. The space left between escalating disagreements in MCP, confusion over the ‘real’ MCP’s stand on Aford, and the ruling UDF’s campaign tactics was too small for the articulation of a viable alliance agenda.
To some extent, Tembo’s reluctance was an admission of the inadequacies of decision making in political parties, as well as the general lack of real grass roots’ representation in such processes. On this line of thinking, the alliance’s failure at the polls was a form of ‘voice’ for grass roots communities, a message that had no other form than ‘failure’.
All this happened some 11 years ago, and people expected new things and challenges. It has not been so, though, because, instead of taking the exciting political road replete with twists and turns, our politicians have chosen to take the straight road to the nearest elections. This is worrying Amunandife Mkumba, Malawi Democratic Union (MDU) president. When Malawians last saw Kamuzu on a presidential ballot box, Mkumba was there. He acknowledges being one of the most hopeful people then.
“After all, we had worked so hard to reach that level of going to the polls to choose the Head of state and government and Members of Parliament. Some of us risked our lives writing and distribution secret letters in the middle of night,” said Mkumba.
Now, after some 16 years of multiparty democracy, what does he say? Are we there?
“Not yet; we are still trying. It is all the same everywhere. Some democracies such as the US have come a long way. In fact, when people realize that some things have been predictable politically, it is a sign of political maturity,” said Mkumba.
MDU is one of the parties whose predictable pattern includes its dependence on alliances with relatively larger parties. Others include Malawi Democratic Party (MDP) of Kamlepo Kalua, Congress for National Unity, Peoples Patriotic Front, Peoples Progressive Movement, Maravi People’s Party, Malawi Forum for Unity in Development, among others.
“This has been one of the weaknesses in our democracy. We have far too many political parties it is difficult to understand their ideologies. That, too, has been one of the most predictable things: more political parties, little, if at all, differences in political ideologies,” said Edward Chaka, executive director for Peoples Federation for National Peace and Development (Pefenap).
Chaka said the country needed influential parties that worked on incorruptible principles, contrary to current trends where courageous politicians wither when caught up in a net of adverse circumstances. They also often drop into a vacuum of political objectives and offer no clear direction.
“We don’t need leaders who are always busy buying time in a world where there is no spare time. Each time, and thus election, is important; parties should be talking of making new in roads,” he said.
Others, like Institute for Policy Interaction executive director, Rafiq Hajat, and Human Rights Consultative Committee chairperson Undule Mwakasungula, feel that the road is partly paved and partly thorny.
The thorny area is that of political tolerance, both in ruling and opposition parties. The issue of suspension of three DPP parliamentarians for airing their constituents’ views on quota system of selection to public universities comes to the fore, so does the recent public fight of UDF supporters at Chileka Airport.
“Political parties need to embrace tolerance to dissenting views. We can then claim that we have come off age,” said Maurice Munthali, Public Affairs Committee publicity secretary.
The other thing winning politicians are likely to pursue is the arrest of perceived enemies. It started with Muluzi, when his administration arrested an ailing Banda. Now the UDF is crying foul, saying DPP is targeting its zealots on trumped up charges. Just who will be on the ‘crying list’ next is unknown, depends on who wins.
“Otherwise. Why is it that only those in opposition are in the wrong. People linked with government and the ruling party is spared,’ queried Friday Jumbe, interim UDF president.
But one thing is for sure. What US Senator John Tyler once said is true: “The man of today gives place to the man of tomorrow, and the idols which one worships, the next destroys.”
Suppression of dissent in ruling parties continues; political bickering and position tussling continues in opposition parties; small parties continue to wait for national elections to hatch the same, old idea of alliances; popular representation remains a fallacy; and, somewhere, handcuffs are waiting for the next politician.
Nothing really changes, although political commentators also agree that Malawi’s road to destination-democracy has been paved on elections’ conduct. Peace has been the buzzword, prompting others to suggestively joke that the country should replace tobacco for peace as the Number One forex earner.
But peace is never for sale. Regional voting patterns are also being dismasntled, a mature sign of unity in purpose, said Hajat.
So far, it has been a game of equal chances: thorns here, pavements there.
Taking the children ‘home’
RICHARD CHIROMBO
The street child’s life is rough and lonely.
They have wishes, hopes, passions, inclinations and secret dreams- but all these cannot alter the state of facts and evidence, which point to dread and gloom.
John Kaliveni, 12, was once a moving hope. He had decided, some seven years earlier, to grow up in his patrimonial home- Mtengo Village in the area of T/A Kalonga, Salima.
That was before his father, the last surviving parent of their family, died in August 2003. When death struck, he- four older brothers and a sister- entered into the shadows. Hope for quality education went with the winds of death. Their seemingly little world collapsed is sorrow and hopelessness. Today, some seven years later, life is yet to return to the basics.
John ‘stays’ in Blantyre, though he has nowhere to really call home.
“The most painful thing is that I don’t know where my brothers and sister are: They went to Lilongwe to look for alms in 2004, and I chose Blantyre. We have never met,” said Kaliveni.
During the afternoon of March 24 this year, LifeLine Southern Africa-Malawi chairperson, Mary Dzinyemba, watched Kaliveni gently set a mahogany box on dusty ground along Mudi River. He then opened the top end of the equally box, stuffed old newspaper clips, forming his idea of a mattress, and ducked in.
It is home for him; the boy who once had a home and enthusiasm, now replaced with perpetual fear of extreme weather conditions without, and the hunger within.
“It was such a sorry sight, yet these are our own children. The nation can do better,” said Dzinyemba.
LifeLine-Malawi is working with its mother body to establish toll-free lines for orphans, street and other vulnerable children. Dzinyemba said the initiative aims to give children suffering from various forms of abuse a life line.
“It’s about giving children facing abusive circumstances another chance; the chance to get out (of these problems),” said Dzinyemba.
However, it is not only LifeLine that is thinking in ‘second-chances’; government has now joined the fray.
It all started when Patricia Kaliati, Gender, Children and Community Development Minister, visited Chilwa Reformatory Centre in Zomba earlier this year. It is either she prepared to say what she did, or else she was prompted by circumstances.
“It is a pity that, while many other children go about in the streets of our cities and town assemblies, places abound in our reformatory centres. Our child reformatory centres are underutilized. This trend must change,’ said Kaliati.
So started the beginnings of a campaign to relocate street children to reformatory institutions by February, and Kaliati has been resolute.
Times come when the truth comes home to many, and people begin to think beyond the narrow isthmus of selfishness. This truth has come to her so many times, as most children at Mkando Trading Centre in Kaliati’s constituency testify.
They have more than a dozen times been the target of Kaliati’s charitable-self, receiving a wide range of goods including blankets, cooking oil, scholarships, and clothes, among others.
Now that she is responsible for all Malawian children as minister, the former teacher merely wants to make her love national; the combined love of a caring mother and professional teacher.
This truth has also come home for women such as Mary Woodworth, director for Mulanje-based Friends of Mulanje Orphans (FOMO). She lives in the United Kingdom, at least the physical form of her, her heart stays in Mulanje.
Like all winds, it started small for her, too. She married a British citizen, who invited her to Europe.
“The children (there) were, mainly, well dressed, well-fed, well-educated. Well-versed with matters of the world,” said Woodworth.
When she came back home for a breather around the year 2000, the truth came home for her right at the airport. Too many differences in infrastructure and technological advancements.
There was, also, the sorry sight of children on the streets of Blantyre. She thought the problem was only common in Blantyre and Lilongwe, but was shocked to find that the situation was similar in Mulanje, her home district.
“Even worse. The HIV and AIDS pandemic was breaking communities apart, challenges of poverty and resource constraints were clouding prospects for the future. There was also the issue of girls dropping out of school. Something had to be done, hence FOMO’s efforts,” said Woodworth, touched by the invisible hand of truth.
The children in Mulanje welcomed her, and her gesture; but Kaliati seems to be in trouble making her love ‘national’.
“Some street children have gone into hiding. Many are running away, and this is quiet surprising. How could people run away from assistance? The thing is, we will not stop mid-way through the road, we will look for them and go on with the exercise,” said Kaliati.
A tale of love gone bad. Can love really go ‘bad’?
“Yes, it does. Depending on the approach you adopt to solve a problem. After all, how can children run away from help? My submission is that the initiative is good, but has been hastily implemented,” said Kenwilliams Mhango, Country Director for African Network for the Prevention and Protection of Child Abuse and Neglect-Malawi Chapter.
Mhango said there was no need for short cuts. The Ministry of Gender, Children and Community Development would have carried out comprehensive publicity campaigns to rid the campaign of any huddles in understanding, invested heavily in reformatory centre infrastructure, and won civil society support.
Take, for instance, the issue of location. He says the way child reformatory centres are concentrated sends wrong signals about the existence of street children, and the challenges they face.
“Do we have a reformatory centre in the Northern region? No. Don’t we have street children there? We do,” Mhango answers his own questions.
Mhango blames short cuts for exacerbating the situation, saying most children would willingly offer themselves up to such “a positive, life-changing move’.
He had ready examples. Take, for instance, the issue of his organization’s name: African Network for the Prevention and Protection of Child Abuse and Neglect- Malawi Chapter. It is such a long name, a winding road.
“Many people have suggested that we adopt a short name. They say the name is too long. But we say, “No, there is no need for short cuts when the name explains everything well. We are comfortable with both the name and the length of the name’,” said Mhango.
The short of it all is that there are times shortcuts pay, but mostly they do not pay.
The issue of reformatory and protective services for children has a long history, though the story is younger than when human life begun. In ancient times, when might was right, children had no right to live, and could be disposed of with little compunction.
Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian during the late 1st Century B.C., bears witness that many people in that once great empire, including the Ceylonese, could discard of children perceived to have no courage or endurance. Such children, when not killed, rushed into streets and public places.
The Greeks did not want any physically challenged children to grow, also. Plato accepted this status quo and Aristotle recommended a law prohibiting parents from rearing physically challenged children, which led physician Soranus, a 2nd Century practitioner, to instruct midwives to examine each child at birth and get rid of those not fit.
In Egypt, on the other hand, parents who killed their children were merely sentenced to ‘hug’ the corpse continually for seventy-two hours, the punishers thinking that it was not fit those who gave life to the child to die, but that they should be punished in such a way as to create repentance and deter them from committing any such acts.
Children’s rights enjoyed secondary status to national interests, necessitating strategies to bail them out of such a quagmire.
During this very early period, Athens and Rome had orphan homes. The name brephotrophia (for these welfare centres) was mentioned in 529 in Justinian law, one of the most influential pieces of legislation. With the rise of Christianity, the church provided for foundlings and every village had a xenodochium- a hospice for pilgrims and the poor, which also embraced children without homes.
By the Sixth Century, the brephotrophium at Trier had a marble receptacle with which abandoned children could be safely deposited secretly. Similar institutions in France in the Seventh Century were the forerunners of the welfare system of the Nineteenth Century, with the establishment of the first such hospice by Datheus, the archpriest of Milan in 787.
In Mesopotamia, the strategy was different. Starting from 6000 years ago, orphans and vulnerable children had a goddess. Writer Rig Veda also mentions another deity among ancient Hindus who rescued vulnerable children and endowed them with legal rights to protection.
The gods reflected a mirror image of humanity, affording a picture of what went on among people, and how wrongs could be corrected. This was supplemented by more laws guaranteeing rights of the child to protection, and included the Laws of Solon in 600 B.C., which required army commanders to raise, at the expense of government, children of soldiers killed in battle.
Wives of Roman emperors, who initiated child welfare programmes, emulated this gesture. Around this same time, St. Nicholas Thaumaturgos- wonder worker of the 3rd Century, who was also Patron Saint of children and protector of the feeble minded- revolutionized the phenomenon of child welfare.
Main strategies of offering child protective services has consisted of placing children in government run institutions, private organisations or under foster care.
Russian and British law also initiated early involvement of government in public welfare, with the main reliance being on alms-houses where, to off set expense and save children from the ‘sin’ of idleness, children were forced to work, according to The Battered Child, a book tackling the issue of child abuse and neglect in the world.
However, child protective services have not been without blemish, and their impacts have continually been questioned. An1881German report on childcare services stated that 31 per cent of illegitimate children died under foster care, allegedly from natural causes (but really from freezing, starvation and deliberate destruction). The report discovered that foster care givers had ‘discovered’ that the best way of getting rid of the children was to give them nothing but pacifiers soaked in brandy!
This was negative, sure, but helped in making sure that the issue of childcare rose from a relatively obscure position to a matter of public and professional concern in the US in early 1960s.
In all these cases, there is no report of children escaping- as Malawi has come to learn.
Only that Kaliati never gives up, and has a clever way of summing things up: “We are all still learning from all this and, no matter how difficult it proves or long it takes, we will place these children home. Reformatory centres are the best ever place for them, where they will be nurtured and grow into productive citizens. It is as simple as that.”
Paved or thorny: Malawi’s democratic path to 2014
RICHARD CHIROMBO
Intolerance. Dissent suppression. Intra-party bickering. Suppressed egos. Hero-worshipping. Thin, if any, ideological differences. Twisted principles.
It does not take long to define the subject: Malawi politics.
Since multiparty politics of government came back home in 1994, and got three more turns of ‘welcome-home-parties’ in 1999, 2004 and 2009, the country’s political scene has become well-dotted with political events, most of which predictable.
Malawians have come to expect a stillness of political egos in ruling parties, especially when the incumbent president is running for the first five years, while intra-party bickering has become part of the ‘norm’ in opposition parties- a way, perhaps, of passing political sleep away in the long-wait for Sanjika Palace or New State House.
Long-wait because no opposition party has ever won Presidential elections since 1994, save, perhaps, for the unique case of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Former United Democratic Front (UDF) National Publicity Secretary, Sam Mpasu, had one political adage he so loved to press home: people, he argued, form political parties to win the golden ticket into government. That is common sense.
But some special breed of people, Malawians to our credit, went into government in order to form a political party! That fascinated Mpasu so much- much the same way as it reinforced the established point that Malawi is a country of great inventors (the likes of Gabriel Kondesi, William Kamkwamba and, after 2004, the political inventor that is State President Bingu wa Mutharika, among others).
As some form of artificial tranquility prevails in ruling parties, the parties in question soon ‘forget’ the contentious issue of succession, leaving all sense of judgment to ‘time’, which, they always argue, ‘will tell’. The reason for letting succession dogs lie is often that, because the leaders won their maiden Presidential contest, they will do it (win) again.
That is the reason nobody bothered former president Bakili Muluzi, within the ranks and file of UDF between 1994 and 1999, on succession plans; a honeymoon that continued between 1999 and 2004 when it became apparently clear that, while the driver was still enjoying the feel of the highway and wanted to continue cruising beyond legal speed, the road in front was fast disappearing into some peculiar, dusty path.
Such leaders quickly grow bigger than their sponsoring parties and develop quick-fire anger even to friendly advice. The end, in our case, has been a disaster for intra-party democracy because leaders are imposed on political parties to satisfy the insatiable anger of the powers-that-be.
Just such a disaster happened in the UDF, a party that once wore ‘mighty’ armor during its time of glory. Because it had everything at its disposal in those ‘mighty’ days, the party wore the ‘heavy suit of prosperity’ to withstand even the most volatile of forces; now, it struggles in the great sea of near-obscurity that it has adopted the weight-light life saving jacket to survive the stormy waters.
Ironically, the same argument that offers first-time ruling parties artificial tranquility has the opposite effect on opposition parties. Because their leaders lost one election, other aspirants begin to fume, saying chances are that they (losers) will loose again. Once beaten, twice shy; twice beaten? The answer is what they dread.
That answer is what Malawi Congress Party (MCP) presidential aspirants never wanted to be the unfortunate part of between 1994 and 1999, too. First President, Ngwazi Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, fell against Muluzi in the 1994 race to Sanjika, and never sought to rise again.
He took the white flag to Mudi State Residence in Blantyre, where he went to stay after getting unceremoniously booted out of Sanjika Palace, but left the wooden post with the green lights to Gwanda Chakuamba- his vice presidential running-mate in the monumental polls.
John Zenus Ungapake Tembo, the ever-ambitious Dedza South Member of Parliament, was chosen MCP vice president. Political analysts saw them as the perfect example of a strange political pair, doubts that soon back-rode the horse of reality when time came to choose a presidential running mate.
Chakuamba, aware of Alliance for Democracy (Aford) president, Chakufwa Chihana’s, discontentment with the UDF administration, wanted to outsmart the ruling cadres by forging a working alliance with Aford. While common sense had it that Chihana gets the running mate slot, Tembo could have none of it.
Chakuamba and Chihana? These were strange bedfellows, too; more so because Chihana had fought gallantly against the one party regime, efforts that paid dividends at the ballot box. It was a common choral cord Chihana and the likes of Muluzi had touched, and they got their just desserts.
But politics is not a duvet you get into in the evening, and hope to still be there by sunrise: it is dynamic, and changes with the times. Chakuamba and Chihana got this wisdom quite well, and wanted to use it for a free tough lesson on the ‘big-headed’ UDF.
Because Tembo did not whole-heartedly support the two, the alliance- like the conflict it created- was not symmetrical. The space left between escalating disagreements in MCP, confusion over the ‘real’ MCP’s stand on Aford, and the ruling UDF’s campaign tactics was too small for the articulation of a viable alliance agenda.
To some extent, Tembo’s reluctance was an admission of the inadequacies of decision making in political parties, as well as the general lack of real grass roots’ representation in such processes. On this line of thinking, the alliance’s failure at the polls was a form of ‘voice’ for grass roots communities, a message that had no other form than ‘failure’.
All this happened some 11 years ago, and people expected new things and challenges. It has not been so, though, because, instead of taking the exciting political road replete with twists and turns, our politicians have chosen to take the straight road to the nearest elections. This is worrying Amunandife Mkumba, Malawi Democratic Union (MDU) president. When Malawians last saw Kamuzu on a presidential ballot box, Mkumba was there. He acknowledges being one of the most hopeful people then.
“After all, we had worked so hard to reach that level of going to the polls to choose the Head of state and government and Members of Parliament. Some of us risked our lives writing and distribution secret letters in the middle of night,” said Mkumba.
Now, after some 16 years of multiparty democracy, what does he say? Are we there?
“Not yet; we are still trying. It is all the same everywhere. Some democracies such as the US have come a long way. In fact, when people realize that some things have been predictable politically, it is a sign of political maturity,” said Mkumba.
MDU is one of the parties whose predictable pattern includes its dependence on alliances with relatively larger parties. Others include Malawi Democratic Party (MDP) of Kamlepo Kalua, Congress for National Unity, Peoples Patriotic Front, Peoples Progressive Movement, Maravi People’s Party, Malawi Forum for Unity in Development, among others.
“This has been one of the weaknesses in our democracy. We have far too many political parties it is difficult to understand their ideologies. That, too, has been one of the most predictable things: more political parties, little, if at all, differences in political ideologies,” said Edward Chaka, executive director for Peoples Federation for National Peace and Development (Pefenap).
Chaka said the country needed influential parties that worked on incorruptible principles, contrary to current trends where courageous politicians wither when caught up in a net of adverse circumstances. They also often drop into a vacuum of political objectives and offer no clear direction.
“We don’t need leaders who are always busy buying time in a world where there is no spare time. Each time, and thus election, is important; parties should be talking of making new in roads,” he said.
Others, like Institute for Policy Interaction executive director, Rafiq Hajat, and Human Rights Consultative Committee chairperson Undule Mwakasungula, feel that the road is partly paved and partly thorny.
The thorny area is that of political tolerance, both in ruling and opposition parties. The issue of suspension of three DPP parliamentarians for airing their constituents’ views on quota system of selection to public universities comes to the fore, so does the recent public fight of UDF supporters at Chileka Airport.
“Political parties need to embrace tolerance to dissenting views. We can then claim that we have come off age,” said Maurice Munthali, Public Affairs Committee publicity secretary.
The other thing winning politicians are likely to pursue is the arrest of perceived enemies. It started with Muluzi, when his administration arrested an ailing Banda. Now the UDF is crying foul, saying DPP is targeting its zealots on trumped up charges. Just who will be on the ‘crying list’ next is unknown, depends on who wins.
“Otherwise. Why is it that only those in opposition are in the wrong. People linked with government and the ruling party is spared,’ queried Friday Jumbe, interim UDF president.
But one thing is for sure. What US Senator John Tyler once said is true: “The man of today gives place to the man of tomorrow, and the idols which one worships, the next destroys.”
Suppression of dissent in ruling parties continues; political bickering and position tussling continues in opposition parties; small parties continue to wait for national elections to hatch the same, old idea of alliances; popular representation remains a fallacy; and, somewhere, handcuffs are waiting for the next politician.
Nothing really changes, although political commentators also agree that Malawi’s road to destination-democracy has been paved on elections’ conduct. Peace has been the buzzword, prompting others to suggestively joke that the country should replace tobacco for peace as the Number One forex earner.
But peace is never for sale. Regional voting patterns are also being dismasntled, a mature sign of unity in purpose, said Hajat.
So far, it has been a game of equal chances: thorns here, pavements there.
Taking the children ‘home’
RICHARD CHIROMBO
The street child’s life is rough and lonely.
They have wishes, hopes, passions, inclinations and secret dreams- but all these cannot alter the state of facts and evidence, which point to dread and gloom.
John Kaliveni, 12, was once a moving hope. He had decided, some seven years earlier, to grow up in his patrimonial home- Mtengo Village in the area of T/A Kalonga, Salima.
That was before his father, the last surviving parent of their family, died in August 2003. When death struck, he- four older brothers and a sister- entered into the shadows. Hope for quality education went with the winds of death. Their seemingly little world collapsed is sorrow and hopelessness. Today, some seven years later, life is yet to return to the basics.
John ‘stays’ in Blantyre, though he has nowhere to really call home.
“The most painful thing is that I don’t know where my brothers and sister are: They went to Lilongwe to look for alms in 2004, and I chose Blantyre. We have never met,” said Kaliveni.
During the afternoon of March 24 this year, LifeLine Southern Africa-Malawi chairperson, Mary Dzinyemba, watched Kaliveni gently set a mahogany box on dusty ground along Mudi River. He then opened the top end of the equally box, stuffed old newspaper clips, forming his idea of a mattress, and ducked in.
It is home for him; the boy who once had a home and enthusiasm, now replaced with perpetual fear of extreme weather conditions without, and the hunger within.
“It was such a sorry sight, yet these are our own children. The nation can do better,” said Dzinyemba.
LifeLine-Malawi is working with its mother body to establish toll-free lines for orphans, street and other vulnerable children. Dzinyemba said the initiative aims to give children suffering from various forms of abuse a life line.
“It’s about giving children facing abusive circumstances another chance; the chance to get out (of these problems),” said Dzinyemba.
However, it is not only LifeLine that is thinking in ‘second-chances’; government has now joined the fray.
It all started when Patricia Kaliati, Gender, Children and Community Development Minister, visited Chilwa Reformatory Centre in Zomba earlier this year. It is either she prepared to say what she did, or else she was prompted by circumstances.
“It is a pity that, while many other children go about in the streets of our cities and town assemblies, places abound in our reformatory centres. Our child reformatory centres are underutilized. This trend must change,’ said Kaliati.
So started the beginnings of a campaign to relocate street children to reformatory institutions by February, and Kaliati has been resolute.
Times come when the truth comes home to many, and people begin to think beyond the narrow isthmus of selfishness. This truth has come to her so many times, as most children at Mkando Trading Centre in Kaliati’s constituency testify.
They have more than a dozen times been the target of Kaliati’s charitable-self, receiving a wide range of goods including blankets, cooking oil, scholarships, and clothes, among others.
Now that she is responsible for all Malawian children as minister, the former teacher merely wants to make her love national; the combined love of a caring mother and professional teacher.
This truth has also come home for women such as Mary Woodworth, director for Mulanje-based Friends of Mulanje Orphans (FOMO). She lives in the United Kingdom, at least the physical form of her, her heart stays in Mulanje.
Like all winds, it started small for her, too. She married a British citizen, who invited her to Europe.
“The children (there) were, mainly, well dressed, well-fed, well-educated. Well-versed with matters of the world,” said Woodworth.
When she came back home for a breather around the year 2000, the truth came home for her right at the airport. Too many differences in infrastructure and technological advancements.
There was, also, the sorry sight of children on the streets of Blantyre. She thought the problem was only common in Blantyre and Lilongwe, but was shocked to find that the situation was similar in Mulanje, her home district.
“Even worse. The HIV and AIDS pandemic was breaking communities apart, challenges of poverty and resource constraints were clouding prospects for the future. There was also the issue of girls dropping out of school. Something had to be done, hence FOMO’s efforts,” said Woodworth, touched by the invisible hand of truth.
The children in Mulanje welcomed her, and her gesture; but Kaliati seems to be in trouble making her love ‘national’.
“Some street children have gone into hiding. Many are running away, and this is quiet surprising. How could people run away from assistance? The thing is, we will not stop mid-way through the road, we will look for them and go on with the exercise,” said Kaliati.
A tale of love gone bad. Can love really go ‘bad’?
“Yes, it does. Depending on the approach you adopt to solve a problem. After all, how can children run away from help? My submission is that the initiative is good, but has been hastily implemented,” said Kenwilliams Mhango, Country Director for African Network for the Prevention and Protection of Child Abuse and Neglect-Malawi Chapter.
Mhango said there was no need for short cuts. The Ministry of Gender, Children and Community Development would have carried out comprehensive publicity campaigns to rid the campaign of any huddles in understanding, invested heavily in reformatory centre infrastructure, and won civil society support.
Take, for instance, the issue of location. He says the way child reformatory centres are concentrated sends wrong signals about the existence of street children, and the challenges they face.
“Do we have a reformatory centre in the Northern region? No. Don’t we have street children there? We do,” Mhango answers his own questions.
Mhango blames short cuts for exacerbating the situation, saying most children would willingly offer themselves up to such “a positive, life-changing move’.
He had ready examples. Take, for instance, the issue of his organization’s name: African Network for the Prevention and Protection of Child Abuse and Neglect- Malawi Chapter. It is such a long name, a winding road.
“Many people have suggested that we adopt a short name. They say the name is too long. But we say, “No, there is no need for short cuts when the name explains everything well. We are comfortable with both the name and the length of the name’,” said Mhango.
The short of it all is that there are times shortcuts pay, but mostly they do not pay.
The issue of reformatory and protective services for children has a long history, though the story is younger than when human life begun. In ancient times, when might was right, children had no right to live, and could be disposed of with little compunction.
Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian during the late 1st Century B.C., bears witness that many people in that once great empire, including the Ceylonese, could discard of children perceived to have no courage or endurance. Such children, when not killed, rushed into streets and public places.
The Greeks did not want any physically challenged children to grow, also. Plato accepted this status quo and Aristotle recommended a law prohibiting parents from rearing physically challenged children, which led physician Soranus, a 2nd Century practitioner, to instruct midwives to examine each child at birth and get rid of those not fit.
In Egypt, on the other hand, parents who killed their children were merely sentenced to ‘hug’ the corpse continually for seventy-two hours, the punishers thinking that it was not fit those who gave life to the child to die, but that they should be punished in such a way as to create repentance and deter them from committing any such acts.
Children’s rights enjoyed secondary status to national interests, necessitating strategies to bail them out of such a quagmire.
During this very early period, Athens and Rome had orphan homes. The name brephotrophia (for these welfare centres) was mentioned in 529 in Justinian law, one of the most influential pieces of legislation. With the rise of Christianity, the church provided for foundlings and every village had a xenodochium- a hospice for pilgrims and the poor, which also embraced children without homes.
By the Sixth Century, the brephotrophium at Trier had a marble receptacle with which abandoned children could be safely deposited secretly. Similar institutions in France in the Seventh Century were the forerunners of the welfare system of the Nineteenth Century, with the establishment of the first such hospice by Datheus, the archpriest of Milan in 787.
In Mesopotamia, the strategy was different. Starting from 6000 years ago, orphans and vulnerable children had a goddess. Writer Rig Veda also mentions another deity among ancient Hindus who rescued vulnerable children and endowed them with legal rights to protection.
The gods reflected a mirror image of humanity, affording a picture of what went on among people, and how wrongs could be corrected. This was supplemented by more laws guaranteeing rights of the child to protection, and included the Laws of Solon in 600 B.C., which required army commanders to raise, at the expense of government, children of soldiers killed in battle.
Wives of Roman emperors, who initiated child welfare programmes, emulated this gesture. Around this same time, St. Nicholas Thaumaturgos- wonder worker of the 3rd Century, who was also Patron Saint of children and protector of the feeble minded- revolutionized the phenomenon of child welfare.
Main strategies of offering child protective services has consisted of placing children in government run institutions, private organisations or under foster care.
Russian and British law also initiated early involvement of government in public welfare, with the main reliance being on alms-houses where, to off set expense and save children from the ‘sin’ of idleness, children were forced to work, according to The Battered Child, a book tackling the issue of child abuse and neglect in the world.
However, child protective services have not been without blemish, and their impacts have continually been questioned. An1881German report on childcare services stated that 31 per cent of illegitimate children died under foster care, allegedly from natural causes (but really from freezing, starvation and deliberate destruction). The report discovered that foster care givers had ‘discovered’ that the best way of getting rid of the children was to give them nothing but pacifiers soaked in brandy!
This was negative, sure, but helped in making sure that the issue of childcare rose from a relatively obscure position to a matter of public and professional concern in the US in early 1960s.
In all these cases, there is no report of children escaping- as Malawi has come to learn.
Only that Kaliati never gives up, and has a clever way of summing things up: “We are all still learning from all this and, no matter how difficult it proves or long it takes, we will place these children home. Reformatory centres are the best ever place for them, where they will be nurtured and grow into productive citizens. It is as simple as that.”
Paved or thorny: Malawi’s democratic path to 2014
RICHARD CHIROMBO
Intolerance. Dissent suppression. Intra-party bickering. Suppressed egos. Hero-worshipping. Thin, if any, ideological differences. Twisted principles.
It does not take long to define the subject: Malawi politics.
Since multiparty politics of government came back home in 1994, and got three more turns of ‘welcome-home-parties’ in 1999, 2004 and 2009, the country’s political scene has become well-dotted with political events, most of which predictable.
Malawians have come to expect a stillness of political egos in ruling parties, especially when the incumbent president is running for the first five years, while intra-party bickering has become part of the ‘norm’ in opposition parties- a way, perhaps, of passing political sleep away in the long-wait for Sanjika Palace or New State House.
Long-wait because no opposition party has ever won Presidential elections since 1994, save, perhaps, for the unique case of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Former United Democratic Front (UDF) National Publicity Secretary, Sam Mpasu, had one political adage he so loved to press home: people, he argued, form political parties to win the golden ticket into government. That is common sense.
But some special breed of people, Malawians to our credit, went into government in order to form a political party! That fascinated Mpasu so much- much the same way as it reinforced the established point that Malawi is a country of great inventors (the likes of Gabriel Kondesi, William Kamkwamba and, after 2004, the political inventor that is State President Bingu wa Mutharika, among others).
As some form of artificial tranquility prevails in ruling parties, the parties in question soon ‘forget’ the contentious issue of succession, leaving all sense of judgment to ‘time’, which, they always argue, ‘will tell’. The reason for letting succession dogs lie is often that, because the leaders won their maiden Presidential contest, they will do it (win) again.
That is the reason nobody bothered former president Bakili Muluzi, within the ranks and file of UDF between 1994 and 1999, on succession plans; a honeymoon that continued between 1999 and 2004 when it became apparently clear that, while the driver was still enjoying the feel of the highway and wanted to continue cruising beyond legal speed, the road in front was fast disappearing into some peculiar, dusty path.
Such leaders quickly grow bigger than their sponsoring parties and develop quick-fire anger even to friendly advice. The end, in our case, has been a disaster for intra-party democracy because leaders are imposed on political parties to satisfy the insatiable anger of the powers-that-be.
Just such a disaster happened in the UDF, a party that once wore ‘mighty’ armor during its time of glory. Because it had everything at its disposal in those ‘mighty’ days, the party wore the ‘heavy suit of prosperity’ to withstand even the most volatile of forces; now, it struggles in the great sea of near-obscurity that it has adopted the weight-light life saving jacket to survive the stormy waters.
Ironically, the same argument that offers first-time ruling parties artificial tranquility has the opposite effect on opposition parties. Because their leaders lost one election, other aspirants begin to fume, saying chances are that they (losers) will loose again. Once beaten, twice shy; twice beaten? The answer is what they dread.
That answer is what Malawi Congress Party (MCP) presidential aspirants never wanted to be the unfortunate part of between 1994 and 1999, too. First President, Ngwazi Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, fell against Muluzi in the 1994 race to Sanjika, and never sought to rise again.
He took the white flag to Mudi State Residence in Blantyre, where he went to stay after getting unceremoniously booted out of Sanjika Palace, but left the wooden post with the green lights to Gwanda Chakuamba- his vice presidential running-mate in the monumental polls.
John Zenus Ungapake Tembo, the ever-ambitious Dedza South Member of Parliament, was chosen MCP vice president. Political analysts saw them as the perfect example of a strange political pair, doubts that soon back-rode the horse of reality when time came to choose a presidential running mate.
Chakuamba, aware of Alliance for Democracy (Aford) president, Chakufwa Chihana’s, discontentment with the UDF administration, wanted to outsmart the ruling cadres by forging a working alliance with Aford. While common sense had it that Chihana gets the running mate slot, Tembo could have none of it.
Chakuamba and Chihana? These were strange bedfellows, too; more so because Chihana had fought gallantly against the one party regime, efforts that paid dividends at the ballot box. It was a common choral cord Chihana and the likes of Muluzi had touched, and they got their just desserts.
But politics is not a duvet you get into in the evening, and hope to still be there by sunrise: it is dynamic, and changes with the times. Chakuamba and Chihana got this wisdom quite well, and wanted to use it for a free tough lesson on the ‘big-headed’ UDF.
Because Tembo did not whole-heartedly support the two, the alliance- like the conflict it created- was not symmetrical. The space left between escalating disagreements in MCP, confusion over the ‘real’ MCP’s stand on Aford, and the ruling UDF’s campaign tactics was too small for the articulation of a viable alliance agenda.
To some extent, Tembo’s reluctance was an admission of the inadequacies of decision making in political parties, as well as the general lack of real grass roots’ representation in such processes. On this line of thinking, the alliance’s failure at the polls was a form of ‘voice’ for grass roots communities, a message that had no other form than ‘failure’.
All this happened some 11 years ago, and people expected new things and challenges. It has not been so, though, because, instead of taking the exciting political road replete with twists and turns, our politicians have chosen to take the straight road to the nearest elections. This is worrying Amunandife Mkumba, Malawi Democratic Union (MDU) president. When Malawians last saw Kamuzu on a presidential ballot box, Mkumba was there. He acknowledges being one of the most hopeful people then.
“After all, we had worked so hard to reach that level of going to the polls to choose the Head of state and government and Members of Parliament. Some of us risked our lives writing and distribution secret letters in the middle of night,” said Mkumba.
Now, after some 16 years of multiparty democracy, what does he say? Are we there?
“Not yet; we are still trying. It is all the same everywhere. Some democracies such as the US have come a long way. In fact, when people realize that some things have been predictable politically, it is a sign of political maturity,” said Mkumba.
MDU is one of the parties whose predictable pattern includes its dependence on alliances with relatively larger parties. Others include Malawi Democratic Party (MDP) of Kamlepo Kalua, Congress for National Unity, Peoples Patriotic Front, Peoples Progressive Movement, Maravi People’s Party, Malawi Forum for Unity in Development, among others.
“This has been one of the weaknesses in our democracy. We have far too many political parties it is difficult to understand their ideologies. That, too, has been one of the most predictable things: more political parties, little, if at all, differences in political ideologies,” said Edward Chaka, executive director for Peoples Federation for National Peace and Development (Pefenap).
Chaka said the country needed influential parties that worked on incorruptible principles, contrary to current trends where courageous politicians wither when caught up in a net of adverse circumstances. They also often drop into a vacuum of political objectives and offer no clear direction.
“We don’t need leaders who are always busy buying time in a world where there is no spare time. Each time, and thus election, is important; parties should be talking of making new in roads,” he said.
Others, like Institute for Policy Interaction executive director, Rafiq Hajat, and Human Rights Consultative Committee chairperson Undule Mwakasungula, feel that the road is partly paved and partly thorny.
The thorny area is that of political tolerance, both in ruling and opposition parties. The issue of suspension of three DPP parliamentarians for airing their constituents’ views on quota system of selection to public universities comes to the fore, so does the recent public fight of UDF supporters at Chileka Airport.
“Political parties need to embrace tolerance to dissenting views. We can then claim that we have come off age,” said Maurice Munthali, Public Affairs Committee publicity secretary.
The other thing winning politicians are likely to pursue is the arrest of perceived enemies. It started with Muluzi, when his administration arrested an ailing Banda. Now the UDF is crying foul, saying DPP is targeting its zealots on trumped up charges. Just who will be on the ‘crying list’ next is unknown, depends on who wins.
“Otherwise. Why is it that only those in opposition are in the wrong. People linked with government and the ruling party is spared,’ queried Friday Jumbe, interim UDF president.
But one thing is for sure. What US Senator John Tyler once said is true: “The man of today gives place to the man of tomorrow, and the idols which one worships, the next destroys.”
Suppression of dissent in ruling parties continues; political bickering and position tussling continues in opposition parties; small parties continue to wait for national elections to hatch the same, old idea of alliances; popular representation remains a fallacy; and, somewhere, handcuffs are waiting for the next politician.
Nothing really changes, although political commentators also agree that Malawi’s road to destination-democracy has been paved on elections’ conduct. Peace has been the buzzword, prompting others to suggestively joke that the country should replace tobacco for peace as the Number One forex earner.
But peace is never for sale. Regional voting patterns are also being dismasntled, a mature sign of unity in purpose, said Hajat.
So far, it has been a game of equal chances: thorns here, pavements there.
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