A Miscarriage of Mother Malawi's Pregnancy

Nations are pregnant things and must be handled with care if they are to bring forth healthy offspring into the world. This is what I find from the curious case of my country of Malawi, which had three pregnancies over the last century,and which entered the new century in the middle of a fourth pregnancy. 

In her first pregnancy, Malawi conceived a child she planned to name Freedom, being impregnated by the revolutionary ideas of such freedom-fighting pioneers as John Chilembwe. But tragically, Mother Malawi had a miscarriage and the offspring of freedom died in the cold winter night of Colonialism. Malawi's second pregnancy was a success, bringing forth the child of Independence, brimming with the promise of new found freedoms and self-determination. But the child soon abandoned the values by which he was raised, denounced his parents, took all the credit for the freedom they gave him, declared himself sovereign over their estate, and changed his name from Independence to Dictatorship. Though this rogue child's rule was threatened and challenged several times, he successfully and ruthlessly cracked down on any contenders, and Mother Malawi has still not really taken stock of how many attempts that selfish child made to maim her and leave her barren for life. But before she had the time or presence of mind to count and nurse her wounds, which is critical to healthy motherhood, Malawi was pregnant again for a third time, and though her labor pains were hard, overdue, and induced, she brought forth a son named Multi-Party, who ended the one-party rule of his rogue brother, Dictatorship. 

But it is now rumored that this boy, Multi-Party, has a twin sister yet to be delivered from Mother Malawi's womb. It is said that because of and in her absence, Multi-Party has struggled to find his balance between freedom and responsibility, between development and governance, between aid and trade, between sovereignty and partnership, between security and justice, between leadership and consensus, between ideology and personality, between rural and urban. But instead of waiting for his twin sister to be born, Multi-Party has carried on without her, feeding and living off Mother Malawi without regard for the well-being of the mother or the child she still carries, and giving no thought to how much the act of welcoming and preparing for the birth of that child is the only thing that will fix the imbalances of his dysfunctional rule. 

Multi-Party's unborn twin sister is called Democracy. And there is no doubt that Mother Malawi is in the delivery room again, for her pain is now felt and groans are now heard all over the country. Malawi is fighting to bring forth her first daughter, a beauty that will be the envy of the nations and tether the excesses of Multi-Party politics, but Multi-Party is making it difficulty by clinging on to Mother Malawi and claiming to be the only child she needs to be happy.  In so doing, Multi-Party is showing all the same traits of Dictatorship, the rogue brother he ousted from power, but under a different name. And by the look of things, Democracy's birth might be accompanied by more sweat, tears, and blood than Multi-Party's.  The question is whether Mother Malawi's pushing in the delivery room will be strong, focused, and concerted enough to bring this child into the world, or be weakened by Multi-Party's depletion of her strength and health until she miscarries. If Malawi is to give birth successfully, she must push with one breath, cry with one voice, sweat from one brow, bleed as one body; and she must interpret the intensifying contractions between the government and the people as painful calls to push some more, cry some more, sweat some more, and bleed some more.         

I was recently reminded of all this during the sublime experience of holding my wife's hand as she gave birth to our third born son, a privilege I wouldn't trade for all the stars in the universe. I saw how that the beauty of the delivery room lies in its apparent contradiction, because a woman giving birth is the quintessence of mixed emotion. In one glimpse you see enough blood to evoke fears of death, and yet hear the voice of a new born announce the beginning of life; in one breath the prospective mother screams in excruciating pain, and in another she laughs with a joy that a man can only watch with envy; in one moment you are glad to hear the baby cry and yet feel you'd do anything to cry in its place; here the baby enters the world without a name, and yet does so already fully known and loved by its parents; here the medical personnel cram a room as though their patient is dying, yet their smiles expose their satisfaction that theirs are the kind of patients who are full of life; the list of such paradoxes could go on. And if you accidentally stumbled upon such a room not knowing that the patient on the table is in the middle of an experience she will regard as the most fulfilling of her life, you would easily find enough evidence in that delivery room to record it in your memory as the scene of a tragedy. But you would be wrong. Dead wrong.

So I dare say that the Multi-Party politics of the Tembo, Muluzi and Mutharika dynasties have been sucking the strength and promise of pregnant Mother Malawi; with their nepotism, election rigging, political arrests, oral law, disregard of the constitution, self-aggrandizing speeches, clinging to power past the prime of life, demonizing foreign donors, amassing personal wealth inexplicably, mismanagement of public funds, exploitation of the police force, intimidation of the media, and a general condescension towards rural people. Perhaps they will do so for a few more years, but I hear the screams of Mother Malawi for true Democracy increasing. And with each scream we must push some more and add all our voices, yours and mine, to the cries of a nation that knows that she is about to be delivered.

Deliver Us From Heatherwickianism

A creed may be a small thing, but we only underestimate its power because we wrongly associate size with significance. But noone would trade in a heart for legs simply because the legs are bigger. Defined simply, a creed is one's guiding principle in making choices in life and leadership. The trouble with a creed is not that everyone has one, but that not everyone knows what theirs is. This is largely because not everyone has understood that despite the changes taking place around us, "the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe", as G.K. Chesterton so aptly put it. But that was way back in the day when apathy or ignorance about a person's ideals and principles was considered dangerous, and knowing the difference between one creed and another was primary.  What our forefathers knew as we must rediscover that all creeds are not created equal. And the only thing worse than having a creed you don't know or can't name is deliberately choosing a bad one, especially in your philosophy of government. Yet this is what many politicians in Malawi have done since the dawn of multi-party democracy in 1994. And of all the bad creeds to choose from as a guide for how to be involved in government, the worst and most popular creed among Malawian politicians and voters is what I call "Heatherwickianism".

This is a creed of political survival at all cost. It is so named after Dr. Heatherwick Ntaba, not because he invented it, but because he mastered it to the point of being its very embodiment. While Malawi was staggering on her feet under the crushing weight of Kamuzu Banda's dictatorship, Dr. Ntaba was enjoying first class treatment as the dictator's personal physician, with his lips in such close proximity to the president's ears that one wonders how much of his influence on that oppressive regime  went beyond the sphere of medicine. And when ordinary Malawians were finally agreed on doing away with that dictatorship between 1993 and 1994,  Dr. Ntaba was still clinging on to it in the prestigious role of Foreign Minister. Meanwhile, Malawi's first democratic elections in 1994 did not just succeed in ousting from power the dictator-propping machinery of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), but also created a crisis of identity for the likes of Dr. Ntaba who had been wired to serve a dictator but now had to pretend to be democrats in order to survive.

In a brilliant political move, Dr. Ntaba once again showed his Darwinian instincts by coming out publicly in November 2001 to warn the country's first democratic president, Dr. Bakili Muluzi, to watch out for John Tembo, whom Ntaba claimed was still bent on using the MCP machinery to "do away" with him. In so doing, even though he was still the Treasurer General of the much loathed MCP at the time, Dr. Ntaba began the chameleon-like process of distancing himself from his MCP demons and styling himself as an advocate of democratic values. This long process has culminated in Ntaba securing a place in the inner circle of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) where Ntaba now serves as the president's spokesman. In that role, it is not uncommon to find him peddling partisan propaganda in the local and international media, not only defending every policy of the Bingu Administration, but doing so with the same eloquence and intelligence that have served him well in dignifying and masking his political hypocrisy and his condescension to every political opponent. Ntaba is famously spoken of as having the intelligence of a computer, which I think may be an understatement, for he is more cunning than a computer. His is the ingenuity of a virus.

My point is that Heatherwick Ntaba has survived, not because he is fortunate, but because survival is the very creed he is committed to. And my complaint is not that he has found nothing better to live for than political survival, or no cause for which he would gladly stake his political career. My complaint is that this inferior creed is the guiding principle for many politicians and voters in Malawi. There are now close to fifty political parties in Malawi, not because they fundamentally disagree with each other on "how" the country should be run, but because they merely disagree on "who" should run it. With this approach, we might as well have as many parties as there are citizens. So as far as I can see, Malawi may be in a democratic era, but will not operate by democratic values until the country is led by people who'd rather not be in government than leave a political party whose creed they agree with to join, help, and vote for another party that is running the government by a creed they have always claimed to disagree with; like when former president Bakili Muluzi endorsed John Tembo for president in 2009 after ten years of telling and convincing the country that Tembo's despotic past makes him unfit to run a democracy.
 
Such heatherwickian transitions from one regime and party to another can only be done by those who have no qualms with lying and deceiving people about where their loyalties lie. Perhaps it is self-indicting that the word "politics" is translated as "ndale" in Malawi's local language, a word commonly associated with ruthless deception. The truth is that those who are in politics or vote with this worldview owe their allegiance to no one. And since there isn't much left in President Bingu's leadership for people to believe in, Bingu's remaining circle of advisers and supporters are not there because they believe in Bingu, but because they believe in power, which is worse. And I prophecy that it will be a sign of the dawning of a new and better era when Malawi has a president and parliamentarians around whom the likes of Heatherwick Ntaba are not welcome. But if we want Bingu to be that president, our prayer and encouragement should be for him to replace his circle of sycophantic yes-men before we start calling for him to resign. 

In Defence of Malawi's President

In politics, victory may be desirable, but one of the tragedies of our modern understanding of history is the belief that losers are not worth remembering. But some losers are better teachers than most winners. A case in point is Adlai Ewing Stevenson II, who lost two consecutive presidential elections in his nation's history, but left a repository of wisdom worthy of our generation's attention. It was he who said "a free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular," but this is a truth long forgotten, and nowhere is it more timely to heed this admonition than in my homeland of Malawi.

My president, His Excellency Bingu Wa Mutharika, is the most unpopular man in the country, and I have argued elsewhere that his lack of popularity is deserved. However, what he doesn't deserve are the sinister and ill-advised calls for a speedy and sudden end to his aging life that have become a common and troubling feature of much loose talk and wishful thinking among those whose quarrel with the Head of State is more thuggish than patriotic. And it is at times like this that such voices as Stevenson's cry out from the wilderness of history to warn us against this mood, not just for the sake of the man who is thus unpopular, but also for the sake of sparing his family and our country from a thousand unenviable perils. A president's death is not a thing to trifle with.

So whatever your quarrel is with your president, however disagreeable you find his policies, to whatever extent you feel aggrieved by his leadership, and however incompetent you find his entourage, see to it that you articulate your sentiments and present your argument with civility and respect, and do so with the passion of someone whose love of country is greater than your resentment of its president. And dare to go the second mile by letting that same love of country give you the moral fortitude to defend the life of your president against those who wish him harm, even if you can't defend his policies. And if you find this hard to do, remember that it is only hard because it is the right thing to do.

And here, another truth from the lips of Adlai Ewing Stevenson II comes to our aid by reminding us that we should not expect that living by better principles than this sadist mood will be easy, because as he put it, "it is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them". But in the midst of this hardship there is encouragement and hope, especially if you are a Christian, that by wishing your president well and spending yourself in prayer for him, you will secure yourself a place in the footsteps of such giants of the faith as Daniel, who not only fought for his principles by denouncing King Nebuchadnezzar's decrees as "harsh", but also lived up to those principles by always greeting his king with the words, "O king, live forever!"

Why Malawians Can't Rise Up

It has been suggested by George Bernard Shaw that a democratic election gives a nation the government it deserves. Nowhere do I find this to be more true than in my own country, Malawi. The government of His Excellency Bingu Wa Mutharika has come under heavy criticism over the last two years for its failure to address the economic troubles and unsound policies that have led to fuel and food prices rising astronomically high, fuel supplies dropping low, forex reserves drying up, unemployment levels skyrocketing, draconian taxes choking businesses and enterprise to death, and souring of relations between government and EVERYBODY. And as the criticism has come piling up from local entities like Non Governmental Organisations, Churches, and Civil Society Organisations, the government has exacerbated matters by responding poorly, becoming more defensive in its rhetoric and playing politics of intimidation and misdirection, the most recent example being the Head of State's recent public address in which he issued a directive to the young cadets of his political party to use every means necessary to thwart anti-government demonstrations that don't exist and silence his foreign critics who don't live here. This ludicrous and deteriorating state of the government is alarming, but I submit to you that it is not nearly as alarming as the fact that this is precisely the sort of government our nation deserves. But allow me to make a case for this with three simple examples.

It is public knowledge that Bingu's performance in the elections of 1994 was embarrassingly dismal, and that his rise to power a decade later would not have happened without the political maneuverings of former president Bakili Muluzi who single handedly side-stepped the democratic process and bull-dozed, campaigned, propoagandaed, and bank-rolled Bingu into office.Intriguingly, this seems to be the very playbook from which the president is getting the tactics he is currently using to get his brother elected president in the next elections of 2014. But before you criticize the legitimacy of Bingu's ascendancy to power, explore the political and corporate landscape of Malawi and you will see that the number of positions of authority and influence to which people are appointed by dubious means far outnumber those to which people are appointed fairly and on merit. So Bingu's rise to power, its flaws notwithstanding, is a reflection of Malawi's widespread culture of favoritism and back-door dealings. We got the government we derserve.

In a secret cable to London that later leaked to the media, the former British High Commissioner to Malawi described Bingu's leadership as "intolerant" and "autocratic". And you may remember how humorously Bingu himself proved the criticism true by intolerantly and autocratically kicking this highest ranking British diplomat out of Malawi. But here I say that before you take the speck out of Bingu's eye, examine the log in Malawi's eye, for you will find that almost every chief in a Malawian village, almost every principal of a Malawian school, almost every manager of a Malawian company, almost every owner of a Malawian business, almost every pastor of a Malawian church, and almost every head of a Malawian home is leads autonomously and is intolerant to having their leadership criticized by inferiors. As a case in point, I recently got in a long line of cars at a fuel station and waited for hours when a wealthy gentleman with a new Mercedes Benz arrived and cut to the front of the line. When I criticized him in front of everyone, he respectfully asked me to shut up, arguing that I had no right to criticize his actions. This sense of self-importance and bwana spirit that doesn't want to hear criticism from people who are considered inferior is spread throughout the fabric of Malawian culture, and is the spirit in which we raise our children, treat our women, manage our employees, talk to the poor and illiterate, and rule over domestic workers. There is a common Malawian idiom which says, "Wamkulu saalakwa", which means "A big person or an older person is never wrong". And no one should be shocked that our leaders and elders act like this. So again I say, we got the government we deserve.

Lastly, Bingu has been accused of presiding over a government of corrupt officials, putting economic policies that either favor the rich who can bankroll and support a political party bankrupt of ideas, or empower members of his Lomwe tribe with influential positions where they are enriched overnight as they serve as his loyal watchdogs, or give opportunities to businesses belonging to Chinese entrepreneurs who have no moral incentive to question his human rights record. But is this corrupted behavior of putting trust in the power of money really an isolated phenomenon? Is it not just a reflection of the corruption widely entrenched in the Malawian psyche? Do you know how many regular Malawians are paying bribes everydato either to get ahead or bypass the system at Road Traffic Offices, Police Stations, Fuel Stations, Immigration Offices, Border Customs Offices, and every other office you can think of? The mindset of making a quick buck is well set in and making an honest gain is widely seen as a vice. If this is how it is in government, then we got the government we deserve.

And this principle could be applied to the government's failure to make decisions, failure to cummunicate an inspiring vision, failure to confront its opponents directly rather than at political rallies, failure to tell people the truth, and you'd get the same result. You'd find that it is irrational to expect these virtues from a government consisting of citizens who were chosen from a culture that largely does not hold these values in high esteem. So the sad truth is that in some twisted sense, Malawi is being accurately represented by this government. This doesn't mean that Malawi likes the way things are in government, but it does mean that Malawi is like the way things are in government. And even if there are exceptions, those exceptions are more sufficient to prove the rule than they are to change it. And it is this reality, this fact of sharing and participating in the same vices we see in our government, this nation-wide guilt, that makes us too complacent to rise up and fills us with fear of repercussions and reprisals for doing so. Our guilt makes us loudly condemn these vices in government officials, but it is also makes us hesitate to punish them for them. So I know that the president has fears of Malawians rising up against him, but I believe those fears are unwarranted. An uprising can only be born where the values and pursuits of a government clash with the values and pursuits of the majority of the citizenry. This is not the case in Malawi. The number of places in Malawi that have leadership values and standards similar to the government's far outnumber the places that practice a philosophy of leadership that opposes that of the government. Even the opposition parties in Malawi have no moral authority to claim that they emulate values, methods, and goals of leadership that are counter-cultural to President Bingu's. I do not say that this widespread culture of leadership is good, for I don't believe it is; nor do I say that it is sustainable, for the world is changing too fast for government to keep it the same. But I do say that if the national anthem is right in calling Malawi a Mother, then President Bingu is as true a son to her as are the rest of us. This means that the only ways for us to get a better president is either to pray that God gives us one that is better than we deserve or to become a better people from whom such a president can be chosen and cherished. And as a Christian, I have the unique opportunity of doing both.