Malawi on the Brink: The July 20 Movement

Posted July 21st, 2011 by PT Zeleza

Yesterday, July 20, Malawi was engulfed by protests and riots against
President Bingu wa Mutharika's increasingly bankrupt regime, which
left several people dead and many others injured. There was also
widespread destruction of property across the country's major cities.
The immediate causes of the growing popular disaffection include
deepening authoritarianism and arbitrary power reflected in the
passage of draconian laws against civil liberties; worsening economic
mismanagement as manifested in shortages of fuel and foreign exchange,
power outages, rising unemployment and inflation; the dangerous
mobilization of ethnicity as evident in the redistribution of jobs in
the public sector to favor people from the president's ethnic group;
and desperate attempts to manipulate the president's succession for
his brother, a former law professor at Washington University in St.
Louis, Missouri.

The protests and riots of July 20 are fundamentally about governance
and development, the enduring desire among Malawians for the
establishment of a sustainable democratic developmental state. It
underscores the fact that economic growth without development is not
enough. Over the last five years Malawi's growth has averaged 7%,
peaking at 9.8% in 2008. But the benefits have gone to a few as
poverty remains rampant. Also, this growth hardly put a dent in the
country's reliance on foreign aid, which accounts for up to 40% of the
national budget. As Dambisa Moyo has demonstrated in her controversial
book, Dead Aid, aid has certainly not provided a reliable recipe for
sustainable development in Malawi.

Contrary to stereotypes about the docility and peaceful nature of
Malawians, Malawi has a long history of mass protests going back to
the colonial era including the struggles against the Federation of
Rhodesia and Nyasaland that saw the demise of the federation and the
country's independence in 1964. In the early 1990s, mass protests
culminated in the collapse of President Banda's iron-fisted
dictatorship in the multi-party elections of 1994. As with the "first
independence" from colonialism, the heady hopes of progressive
transformation hit against the sturdy structural blockages of the
postcolonial order rooted in the deeply entrenched deformities of the
colonial state.

The next ten years were marked by fitful advances and setbacks under
President Muluzi's lackluster regime. As in much of Africa undergoing
democratic transitions it became increasingly clear that the road to
democratic consolidation and development would be long and bumpy.
Africa's wily dictators and unimaginative political class seemed keen
to frustrate popular demands and hopes for the "second independence"
from postcolonial authoritarianism and stagnation. After failing to
extend his rule for an unconstitutional third term, President Muluzi
thrust the relatively unknown international technocrat Bingu wa
Mutharika upon the nation as his successor. Predictably, the two men
fell out as President Mutharika sought to consolidate his power. He
bolted from the United Democratic Party still chaired by former
President Muluzi and formed his own party, the Democratic People's
Party.

During President Mutharika's first term, a strong opposition prevented
this political comedy turning tragic. Held in check by the opposition
and surrounded by some competent ministers, the country registered
remarkable economic growth and made noticeable democratic advances. In
the 2009 elections, the DPP was rewarded with an overwhelming victory.
That is when the problems started and the political gloves were
removed to expose the entrenched structural instabilities of Malawi's
political order and the deep insecurities of the president himself.
Malawi, like many postcolonial African countries, suffers from age-old
processes and patterns of uneven development that intersect with wide
regional, class, gender, and generational disparities, which
politicians are adept at mobilizing and exploiting.

Above all, as Frantz Fanon noted in his searing indictment of the
postcolonial elite in The Wretched of the Earth, the commitments of
Malawi's craven political class is more towards ‘primitive
accumulation' than a national project of broad-based development and
democracy. President Mutharika embodies the contradictions of Malawi's
political system and the crassness of Malawi's political class. Like
so many other so-called ‘peaceful' African states, such as Senegal,
the country has yet to make a generational transition in its top
leadership. Thus, while many sectors are dominated by the
post-independence generation, the president is an octogenarian
autocratic who should have long retired from public life as he clearly
is out of tune with the aspirations of his relatively young nation.

President Mutharika, 77, belongs to the nationalist generation that
brought the "first independence" while the vast majority of the
population was born after 1964 indeed 45% of the country's 15.2
million people are below the age of 15. To them the president's
nationalist anxieties and preoccupations with colonialism and
admonition of Britain, the former colonial power, whose ambassador was
expelled from Malawi several months ago for referring to him in a
leaked embassy cable as "ever more autocratic and intolerant of
criticism", are outdated and irrelevant.

Added to this is the president's apparent megalomania evident in his
love for titles including unearned academic titles. For someone who
never received a PhD from an accredited institution and never taught
at a university he insists on being called His Excellence Ngwazi Dr.
Professor Bingu wa Mutharika. He fancies himself an economist and
mister-know-it-all. He has removed competent people from key economic
ministries and institutions. He increasingly bases economic policy on
his misguided understanding of Malawian, let alone African, economic
and political history as is clear from his ill-written 700 page book,
The African Dream: From Poverty to Posterity, published by his
daughter and launched to great fanfare earlier this year.

It is the president's outdated fidelity to the nationalist politics of
the 1960s that partly explains his myopic admiration for Malawi's
founding president, whose policies and even dress he tries hard to
emulate. The two presidents also share another commonality: they came
back to rule after decades spent in exile and exhibit deep disdain for
their people. They represent the ugly face of diaspora politics, its
modernist conceits, its superiority complexes. President Mutharika's
contempt for Malawians is evident in his condescending speeches and
his shock that the people of Malawi are not grateful for his
leadership. In a bizarre juxtaposition on July 20, while people were
demonstrating around the country, the president was giving a rambling
"public lecture" on the country's political independence, sovereignty,
good governance and the economy. The gods showed their wrath and
ironic humor when power went off for thirty minutes as the professor
president was pontificating.

Like President Banda, whose thirty year dictatorship came to an
ignoble end, President Mutharika is assured of being cut to size by
the people he despises and has come to take for granted. Indeed, of
Malawi's three presidents to date, he is arguably the worst. He
combines President Banda's authoritarianism without the competence of
his government, and President Muluzi's corruption without his
government's tolerance for democracy. The way President Mutharika has
bungled the country's economy and politics boggles the mind. He badly
mishandled the July 19 protests, first banning them and making
threats, then allowing them to go ahead, before orchestrating a court
injunction to stop them on the night of July 20, which only inflamed
the crowds that gathered the next morning and ensured the violence
that ensued. Perhaps the worst mistake he has made is deploying the
military to patrol the streets and re-establish order. African history
shows that governments that come to rely on the military to maintain
civil order create the very conditions for their ouster by the
military.

President Mutharika has unleashed a beast that will consume his
regime. The longer the impasse continues, the more both the military
and masses will feel emboldened. The danger lies in the military
taking matters into its own hands. The best scenario would be for the
military to step back and allow the political process to take its
course as they did in the aftermath of the 1992 referendum that
introduced multi-party democracy. Having overthrown President Banda's
dictatorship, the people of Malawi can take care of President
Mutharika's bankrupt regime by themselves sooner or later.

The regional and international community can assist them by isolating
the regime. This might include imposing targeted sanctions at the
president and his coterie of key advisors and beneficiaries. In the
meantime, human rights activists must keep score of the state
perpetrators of violence against peaceful demonstrators and opponents
of the regime for eventual legal accountability whether in the
country's courts or even the International Criminal Court.

At the time of this writing, the international media is reporting that
at least 18 people have been killed by trigger-happy police and some
thuggish elements from President Mutharika's ruling party who were
instigated and called upon prior to the demonstrations to "deal with"
anyone demonstrating against the government. President Mutharika's
moral bankruptcy and failure of political leadership has been revealed
in his reaction to this tragic turn of events. In a brief, rumbling
address to the nation delivered on state controlled radio and
television, he failed to show any real understanding of the root
causes of the problems that have brought ordinary Malawian citizens to
the streets. Instead, all he could offer by way of explanation is the
bizarre claim that the demonstrators are enemies of the country who
have been instigated or are led by Satan. More tragically, in his
speech President Mutharika failed to do what any decent political
leader would do in such a situation: the basic act of offering
condolences to the families of the 18 individuals killed over the last
twenty-four hours. He simply failed to acknowledge or mention these
innocent deaths. Malawi, or indeed any other country, does not deserve
such leadership.

First Written July 21, 2011