'Accountable to the people': Can President Mutharika be taken at his word?

Malawians lining up to vote on 20th May, 2014

There is one statement in Professor Peter Mutharika’s inaugural speech that will be the ultimate test on which his term of office will be evaluated. Taking over the reins of power at the Kamuzu Stadium in Blantyre on 2^nd June, the president said: “Today, we are launching a government that must be accountable to the people. The central principle of democracy is that everyone must be accountable to someone else.” The president promised a “bottom-up approach” and “people-centred economic growth”.

This has never happened in Malawi before. Despite pronouncements and proclamations to follow the will of the people, we have never had a government that was truly accountable to the people. That President Mutharika chose this particular language in his inaugural address is nothing short of radical. And it should be a shock to those holding decision-making positions in a public sector that was accountable only to itself and ruling party cohorts.

The toughest choice facing newly-elected president Prof. Arthur Peter Mutharika is how he can steer the country in a new direction with the people who helped him win the May 20 elections. Malawians are ready for the “new beginning” Mutharika has promised. But can he deliver this “new beginning” with the same faces that delivered victory? How President Mutharika manages that feat will fore-shadow what his term of office is going to look like.

It is not an easy dilemma. No one needs to be reminded how the majority of Malawians viewed the individuals who formed the inner circle of the DPP until April 5, 2012. But the reality is that they are the same people who have engineered the DPP victory in 2014. They did not work pro bono. They are pregnant with expectation for political and economic rewards. Can Mutharika afford to give Malawi a “new beginning” without having to dispense patronage and appeasement?

Their hearts are pounding with excitement at the prospects of cabinet positions, embassy postings, seats on boards and numerous other political appointments at the president’s disposal, as a token of appreciation. Yet it is those very positions that Malawians are keenly awaiting to scrutinise for the slightest hint of patronage, appeasement and a perpetuation of the old DPP.  

For the second time in as many years Malawi is yet again presented with a ‘reset’ button. Going by the tone struck by the newly-elected president in his inaugural speech, it could be the moment we have been waiting for. But great speeches 

cannot be a substitute for tangible action.

There is a clear starting point for President Mutharika to make good on his promise to be accountable to Malawians. It is still not clear to many of us what caused the mess that happened on election day and during the counting of votes. It is understandable that many people want to move on and let bygones be bygones. But there cannot be peace without truth and justice. The truth of what happened with the election, even if it does not change the outcome, is of paramount importance.

There is a legion of voices joining calls for a thorough investigation of what exactly happened. In the words of Kizito Tenthani, Executive Director of the Centre for Multiparty Democracy, quoted in the Nation on Sunday of 8^th June, “. . . it will be a great injustice to ourselves if we do not pursue and get to the bottom of what really happened so that we should avoid a repeat of the mess that was created.”

Dr. Garton Kamchedzera of Chancellor College in the University of Malawi adds that parties claiming they had evidence of rigging “should have pursued the truth, justice and righteousness for the sake of the nation, even if that could not have changed the results” (Nation on Sunday, 8^th June). He is not alone. Another Chancellor College scholar, Dr. Blessings Chinsinga, says MEC itself indicated there were serious problems with the entire process.

Several MEC commissioners officially wrote a letter expressing deep reservations with the results. Dr. Chinsinga rues the eventuality that we may “never know for sure whether the electoral outcome reflected the genuine will of the people of the will of the courts.” (Sunday Times, 8^th June). He adds that the conduct of the election raises a “serious question about the legitimacy of the new administration.”

Herein lies the perfect place to start demonstrating the accountability President Mutharika has promised. Not only would a process to establish the truth of what happened strengthen his legitimacy, it would also give him a genuine mandate and a clear conscience. If it turns out that it was the losing parties that connived to “hold the nation at ransom” for those ten days, to quote Seodi White, Malawians need to know the losing parties for what they are.

Fortunately or unfortunately for Mutharika, Malawians have taken note of his pledge of accountability, and have already started mobilising on how to hold his government to account. Siku Nkhoma, a social activist and researcher, has developed a monitoring tool drawn from the central tenets of the DPP manifesto. She has assembled a voluntary team of experts who will periodically provide empirical evidence on how the DPP-led government is doing in fulfilling or failing to fulfil its promises. The evidence will be there for all to see.

One innovation that will be interesting to watch is that of community colleges. Prof. Mutharika first talked about this idea towards the end of 2010 when he was Minister of Education.  Community colleges have transformed access to higher education in the US. They offer an affordable education to non-traditional students who dropped out before finishing secondary school, or want to learn a new trade. They cost about $2,500 per year, compared to $7,000 in a public university, and $26,000 in a private university. More than 40 percent of America’s higher education student enrolment is in community colleges.

If properly contextualised and adapted to the Malawian situation, community colleges could decisively end the severe challenges of access to higher education. We have more than 4 million students in primary schools, but at the secondary school level this number drastically drops to less than 300,000. More than 3 million youths slip through the gaping chasm between primary and secondary school in any given cycle. The total enrolment in tertiary education, combining university, technical and vocational colleges, is just above 10,000 but no more than 15,000.

More than 70 percent of Malawians do not have a secondary school education, according to the Malawi Demographic and Health Survey of 2010. As a matter of developing human capital, these numbers portray a national disaster in the making. Lack of opportunities for education has led many Malawians to view intelligence as innate, fixed and immutable, rather than flexible and contingent on environment and opportunities.

And our policies have taken their cue from such beliefs. Our public universities offer an automatic government scholarship to all selected students regardless of whether the student has the need for a scholarship or not. As a result, we have the highest per student expenditure in all of Africa, at 2,000 percent the average in the SADC region. Thankfully, MUST has pioneered a different approach.

If higher education is going to be of central importance in the new administration, it must start with the seat of government. Lilongwe is the only major capital city that I know of that does not have a public university. Public lectures and academic symposia are held in expensive hotels owing to the absence of a prominent university campus. The Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources does not have a presence in the city, depriving policy-makers, government officials, civil society and the citizenry at large an intellectual atmosphere to generate new knowledge and ideas.

While Malawi needs more universities as the DPP manifesto promises, there is a need for whole universities that offer the full gamut of intellectual discourse to include the sciences, the liberal arts, and the social sciences. It does not make sense to have a university of fish here, a university of rice there, a university of cotton at that other place, as Prof. Thandika Mkandawire jokingly advised in a public lecture in 2013.

Professor Mkandawire is the one who gave us the now famous line about what happens to some of Africa’s best intellectuals when they enter politics. He had seen some of these leading intellectuals become, wrote the professor, “unfathomable fools.” As a fellow internationally recognised and leading intellectual in his field, Professor Mutharika will have to work hard to dispel that damning spell.

Experience has taught us that all presidents come in genuinely wanting to change things for the better. Then politics sets in. Power changes people. But when the public takes up its duties and responsibilities, perhaps it might be the end of “business as usual” as the President himself has promised.

In support of Malawian feminism

The debate Malawian women are having about gender and the political space is painful to watch, but it raises one question. Can this debate prove to be a turning point in the way Malawians discuss gender and politics? Regardless of how you answer this question, the challenge for men who don’t take gender as a matter of national importance, and women who don’t believe in the existence of patriarchy, is to respect the women engaged in the debate, and learn from them.

The most important lesson to have emerged out of the current discussion is that the women are holding an open debate about women’s role in leadership without men dictating the terms of the debate.  The debate is a practical application of feminism. It demonstrates that women can be free to disagree with President Joyce Banda, and can avoid falling into the uncritical position that they should vote for a president on the simplistic basis that she is a woman. Rather, the decision as to whether or not to vote for President Banda, as Jessie Kabwila and Seodi White argue, should be based on what she achieves for the empowerment of Malawian and African women.

This is a high order level of thinking, lacking in most debates Malawians have around our male presidents. As bell hooks (famous for preferring small letters and no capital letter in her name) writes in her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (2000), no other social justice movement has been as self-critical as the feminist movement. She adds that internal critique is critical to any political transformation. In my humble opinion, Malawian women are currently engaged in such an internal critique.

High order thinking

Since this debate started some weeks ago, I have heard from several women who disagree with Jessie Kabwila and Seodi White, the two feminists leading the argument about the need to vote based on achievement and not uncritical sisterhood. The point here is that the women who express the disagreement are themselves practising exactly the kind of critical analysis that Kabwila and White are calling for. These women are refusing to uncritically follow Kabwila and White on the simplistic basis that Kabwila and White are fellow women and therefore should not be criticised.

The intriguing thing is that some of the women I have heard criticising Kabwila and White are not doing it with the consciousness that they are in fact enhancing the terms of the debate and thereby helping change the way we conduct national discourse in this country. Some of them are expressing the criticism because they do find it objectionable that women activists are criticising a fellow woman occupying Malawi’s highest office.

Others are criticising Kabwila and Kapasula on the basis of political partisanship, seeing the criticism against President Banda as criticism aimed at their political party. A considerable number of women are worried about the tone set by Kabwila and White, seeing it as unnecessarily harsh and uncomfortably confrontational. Yet others are voicing their criticism for reasons of the very patriarchy that Kabwila and White are famed for waging battle against. It is not uncommon to hear women disavow the feminist label, drawing a distinction between a feminist and a woman activist.

The reason why some women are feeling scandalised and fatigued by the conduct of the debate is itself rooted in the very patriarchy Kabwila and White work hard to end. As the feminist saying goes, “well-behaved women seldom make history.” This saying should not be misunderstood to mean that women should be aiming at making history for the sake of it. Rather, it should signal to us the pressure many women feel to appear “well-behaved” in a society which defines women’s behaviour on men’s terms. This is the point that was picked up on by Kabwila and White from what President Joyce Banda said in her Nkhata Bay speech about the questionable marital status of some Malawian women activists.

The need for more women candidates in 2014

It is a pity that thus far President Joyce Banda is the only woman candidate in a field that is increasingly likely to be male-dominated, as it has always been. This is where the question being debated by the Malawian women activists comes in. It is a classic dilemma that has divided electorates across the world and across history: reducing the premise for choosing a candidate to a banal factor. In 1994, a lot of Malawians were reduced to this premise when they said “Bola wakuba yemweyo”, in reference to then-UDF presidential candidate Bakili Muluzi. In the 2004 presidential elections in the United States many Americans used the expression “Anybody but Bush”. In both elections, it was the candidate presented as the baser choice that won the election.

My personal preference for 2014 is to vote for a woman president. But there needs to be more women standing, otherwise the choice becomes constrained in the manner highlighted by this debate. This is not to say President Banda has no redeeming grace worthy people’s votes. A lot of international commentators are failing to understand why there seem to be two Joyce Bandas: the Joyce Banda causing so much debate and controversy within Malawi, and the Joyce Banda who has won the hearts of the rest of the world.

Presidency Banda’s ascendancy to the highest office happened at a time when Malawians were collectively re-evaluating their expectations of what Malawian leadership ought to achieve for ordinary Malawians. At the heart of that re-evaluation has been the question of whether the leadership this country has had since independence has been the key reason why development has been too sluggish. Add to that the problems in the economy and increasing socio-economic inequality between the tiny wealthy elites and the rest of us, President Banda’s presidency has been subjected to unprecedented levels of scrutiny.

In the early days of her presidency Dr. Joyce Banda sought to demonstrate a remarkable closeness to ordinary people, cutting a motherly figure with a strong African woman ethos. It persuaded some Malawians, and a lot of foreign observers, but not Malawian chauvinists, who were unable to imagine a woman taking charge while espousing the ethos of an African woman. Some observers detect a shift from the feminist ethos to a masculine tone that seeks to rival the streetwise machinations of her predecessors. The more she has resorted to that style, the louder the criticism has become.

Seizing the new moment

But the ascendancy of President Banda to Malawi’s highest office can be argued to be a fruit of the gradual shift in gains from the feminist and the women’s movements. Not because of the manner in which her predecessor vacated office, but because the occasion found her poised to assume the role. Despite his inner contradictions, the late Bingu wa Mutharika knew about the importance of women’s empowerment, even if he pursued it for his own political gain.

It is undeniable that Joyce Banda’s presidency has excited the echelons of women‘s leadership globally. Women leaders around the globe are organising themselves and planning to use her presidency as a turning point for how development is defined and delivered. This is a not conspiracy, but rather a serendipitous moment when Malawians and Africans are re-inventing the notion of development toward a more grassroots-oriented understanding of empowerment.

There are lessons to be learned from this debate. It is time Malawian men learned to respect women’s ways of debating, and to refrain from wanting to dictate the terms of those debates. To those men who are dismissing the debate as typical of women’s bickering, and to those women who are feeling embarrassed by the debate, take note that Malawian feminism is coming of age.

In the words of bell hooks (2000), “And even though trashing feminism has become commonplace, the reality remains: everyone has benefitted from the cultural revolutions put in place by contemporary feminist movement. It has changed how we see work, how we work, and how we love.” 

Note: A shorter version of this article appeared in the Malawi News of Saturday 14th September, 2013