Before Edward Chitsulo died on that Sunday, March 15, 2015, he had instructed us to publish some of his writings (or he would come back to haunt us all our lives). To honour the promise, we, Sheikh Jean-Philippe LePoisson, SC (RTD), Abiti Joyce Befu (MG 66), Native Authority Mandela and I do here below present this abridged version of the motivational speech he made at the 16th graduation of the Malawi Institute of Journalism, Blantyre, on 28 November, 2013.
————————————-
About 30 years ago, on November 25, 1985 to be specific, I walked into the newsroom with a hybrid attire — a blue blazer jacket, a grey pair of trousers, an over-washed stripped white shirt, and a religiously-polished but severely mended pair of brown shoes. And these were the best I could afford after working for a good five years in the public service as a teacher. But, whether one looked like a Christmas tree or not, ladies and gentlemen, this was the place to be if one were to talk about journalism practice in Malawi. I had arrived.
Of course, the eyes I encountered were not as friendly or as familiar as those I had left in a secondary school staffroom. Hostilities and scorns could be discerned from the few faces that managed to raise their heads as we were introduced, as a seed the Ngwazi (President Hastings Kamuzu Banda) wanted to use in his quest to ‘graduatise’ the newsroom.
From compartment to compartment — as the various newsroom sections were segmented in those days — we were introduced to such cold, untrusting faces; most of them seemingly over-worked staffers, busy minding their day’s business. I was walked from the long-serving Acting Editor’s Desk in the corner, to the Sports Desk, Features Desk, Telex Room, and finally the Chief Reporter’s Desk, which fed current news to the Daily Times, Malawi’s only daily at the time — run by Blantyre Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary of Blantyre Printing and Publishing Company (BP&P) Limited. The other companies that formed the media empire of the Ngwazi were: Blantyre Print and Packaging Company Limited, Olivetti (formerly Gaskells Limited), Times Bookshops Limited, Dzuka Publishing Company Limited, Paper and Printing Supplies Limited, Blantyre Periodicals Limited and Graphic Lintas Worldwide.
Esteemed ladies and gentlemen, if you did not work for the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation, the Malawi News Agency, or the Times, you were not in serious journalism employment in Malawi. .
As we ended at the Chief Reporter’s Desk, we had gone through at least three interviews, the last being with the Chairman, who only welcomed us to BP&P, the Ngwazi’s company, where, he said, the policy was to ensure the good name and image of the Life President, the Malawi Congress Party and the Ngwazi’s diplomatic friends. Note that by the time we were taken to the chairman’s boardroom, Special Branch operatives had been to our villages to find out who we were, what we had done in life and if we were not linked to dissidents abroad. This was, for some us, the beginning of our story in journalism.
Esteemed ladies and gentlemen, parents and relatives, I have gone to great lengths to outline those first steps in journalism just to emphasise that as long as the Ngwazi ruled, the issue was about “secretarial journalism”, “Kamuzuism”, and the one-party rule. Words such as “watchdogs, good governance, transparency or accountability” were not in our academic or professional vocabulary. The catchwords were unity, loyalty, obedience and discipline, on which the Malawi Congress Party and the Malawi nation were founded.
However, let me say that during that period of the strong hand of the Ngwazi, there was a lot of human capacity development. For those at work, training and refresher courses were a critical component of the employee’s package, which is why a lot of us were exposed to the best ways of doing things. We travelled across the continents in search of knowledge because the Ngwazi wanted informed indigenisation; which explains why a lot of us were trained. For those who worked in the Ngwazi’s other empires such as BP & P or worked directly under him in ministries such as Agriculture or Works, professional training was always assured. This also explains why at the advent of multipartyism in the early 1990s, we were skilled enough to jump ship and go our own ways and still remain relevant to our audiences. This, ladies and gentlemen, also explains the origins of the first critical and robust media outlets that graced the landscape in the early 1990s. It also explains the many vibrant technocrats and politicians who opposed the Ngwazi head-on, and went on with the new political dispensation as an informed lot.
