CAN federalism SOLVE unequal development?
In this last part of the federalism series, PROFESSOR DANWOOD CHIRWA argues that federalism is not the answer to unequal development and thus proposes a solution to the same.
I will assume that development is a socio-economic and political process by which people’s well being is improved. This definition takes human well-being as the end of development, and thus requires that infrastructure, resources, institutions and processes, whether be they political, economic or cultural, are deployed and utilised to ensure the continual improvement of people’s quality of life.
On this definition, for a State to improve the well being of its people, it must be able to spend less than the money it receives or collects so that the surplus is dedicated to the establishment of the infrastructure, procedures, processes, policies and programmes for the improvement of people’s lives. The more the state spends on maintaining its institutions, the less surplus it will have to achieve any sustainable or meaningful development. It is simple economics.
Federalism presents the illusion that it will bolster the development of political institutions. But federalism will multiply political institutions from three at the moment (National Legislature, Judiciary and Executive) to a minimum of nine (the three national organs of the State and at least two provincial organs per province, which comes to six assuming there will be three regions). Right now, we struggle to fund State institutions such as the courts, Parliament, government departments, hospitals, schools, etc. With a federal system, not only will we have to fund federal governors and their cabinets (houses, cars, security, fuel, etc) we will have to fund their legislatures and representatives. Added to the bill will be the cost of sustaining local government. The calculus here is based on the leanest federal governments and national governments and the absence of abuse of State resources. If one were to throw greed and the increased opportunities for corruption that the system makes possible into the equation, the problem of affordability can only be underestimated at the expense of sanity.
It is indeed quite irresponsible to create a system of government founded on a platform of donor dependence. It scandalises the nation by reducing it to a begging State and denigrates all its citizens by portraying them as irresponsible human beings who are incapable of devising ways of rescuing the country from the chains of poverty and dependence.
It is not just that a three-tiered system is too extravagant and superfluous; Malawi needs less political actors than professional servants at this time in its political development. Widening the space for politicians in the affairs of the country will only serve to deepen at the regional level the dishonesty, corruption and moral decadence that we have seen at the national level. Malawi also needs to cut her wage bill by reducing underemployment and improving the efficiency of the remaining civil servants who need to be given as much room as possible to work to their professional best without political interference. Needless to say there is already enough duplication of responsibilities between chiefs, MPs, councillors and district commissioners but still no meaningful outcomes.
Federalism is just too complex a system for a small and poor country which has high illiteracy levels and whose political leadership is largely ignorant of its constitutional roles.
If all these reasons are not sufficient to dissuade the reader from federalism, the following alone should. One of Malawi’s persistent problems lies in building a unified nation in which the ethnic identity of a person does not influence access to education, work and other public goods. A false identity based on regions has been contrived and some political parties have placed ethnic politics at the core of their manifestos.
Federalists tell us that we have to come to terms with regionalism, it exists, we must not ignore it, and hence we have to arrange our constitution so that it structures the State on the basis of the boundaries that regionalism makes. They are wrong. Regionalism and ethnicity are evils to be fought and rejected, not embraced as governing principles of the State. It is a good point to make against regionalism that it wrongly lumps together several ethnic groups under one ethnic identity, thereby indirectly introducing a further hierarchy of subjugation between the ethnic groups so lumped together. It is a poor strategy to accept such warped hierarchies as the basic framework of government. To be blunt, we cannot allow a State to be founded on the perceived superiority of the Tumbuka in the North, the Chewa in the Centre and the Lhomwe in the South. Federalist talk then amounts to request to expand the sphere of ethnic domination by admitting two more ethnic groups to the hegemonic hilltop and marginalising even further the smaller ethnic groups. All such lowly thinking however disguised is morally bankrupt and must be exposed and rejected in the strongest terms.
This is how federalism will promote brute ethnicity. Since the system is built on the assumption that federal political actors must promote their provincial and local interests, the politicians who will manage to rouse those narrow passions the most will most likely be elected to provincial and local governments. In turn these representatives will have to implement what they promised their local electorate and hence engage in perpetual tussles with representatives from other regions. In our context where ethnicity and regionalism are already a problem, this does not look like a blueprint for building the country. In fact it means the legalisation of quota systems which are currently unconstitutional. The so-called equitable development will not happen partly because this kind of politics will pose as an obstacle to equitable development as each region and district will try to hold on to its share and contest attempts at prioritising other areas. In this scenario, the districts that are perceived to be the least developed will continue to contribute little to revenue collection and hence receive less from the national pie. Provincial politics conduces to such narrow-minded systems of resource allocation.
It needs to be emphasised that Malawi does not need to propel ethnicists to the forefront of politics. On the contrary, the country is in dire need of leaders who are able to discern and serve the national interest.
As a country, we started on a particularly bad note in 1994, when our first democratic elections showed regional voting patterns. However, by 2009, this trend had changed dramatically as more and more people were voting on grounds other than regionalistic. It is regrettable that President Bingu wa Mutharika singlehandedly decided to reverse this positive trend by donning the ethnic mask soon after being voted so overwhelming by the electorate from all the three regions. That the 2014 elections showed a return to regional voting has to do more with this retrogressive step by Mutharika and the absence of a clear leader with broad national appeal than with the hardening of regionalistic tendencies among the local people. To be sure, regionalism seems to be promoted by educated people more than by poor rural people who seem to get along fairly well.
The right solution
If federalism represents a poor outlet for the clearly justified and steadily growing public frustration with Malawian politics, what is the correct remedy?
The general public needs to redirect its attention to the basics. We must continue to demand a return to constitutionalism. We have veered too far away from that path and for far too long. This can start with the demand for Mutharika to understand that his current government lacks legitimacy. He has to understand that his victory was too narrow, in a poorly organised and, most likely, rigged election. He has to start a new chapter to that inaugurated by his elder brother in 2004 and perfected by Joyce Banda by forming a broad-based government in order to enhance its constitutional legitimacy. This must include an admission that the current electoral commission is corrupt and incompetent, and the establishment of a process to reform the commission and the electoral system and procedures.
Mutharika’s dalliance with Muluzi and his son, Atupele, is an ill-advised substitute for a broad-based government that can unify the nation, if only because the Muluzi brand represents all that is bad and stands to be rejected about Malawian politics. The fact the young Muluzi performed so poorly in the 2014 elections just shows how overrated he is and how far the electorate has moved away from the Muluzi brand.
Thus far, Mutharika has failed to match the start of his elder brother’s first term. It is precisely the fact that the elder Mutharika rejected all that Muluzi represents and brought in as many new and clean people as he could that his first-term presidency was so successful. In contrast, the younger Mutharika remains hooked to the politics of appeasement, recycling and Lhomweisation of government. There is no doubt that the more this government remains reluctant to embrace a new way of doing things and unwilling to reinvent itself as a government for all and not for some, the simmering disaffection will surely explode into something uncontrollable. It is indeed obvious that the quota system of regulating access to education is contributing more negatively than positively overall to nation building and thus must be scraped with immediate effect.
We need to rebuild and strengthen Parliament and other institutions of the state such as the courts, the human rights commission, the civil service, government departments, etc. As far as Parliament is concerned, this is primarily the responsibility of MPs and the Executive. We can add more institutions, but as long as the existing ones do not function as they should, there will not be any meaningful forward match to greater democracy, only a multiplication of mediocrity and dysfunctionality.
Crucially, Mutharika has a great job establishing a fundamental building block for a return to constitutionalism.
