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.