Fuel and electricity: What did Joyce Banda do right?

We are back from Chikwawa or Chikhawa, as our great Malawian president, the only Life President of Malawi, the late (ka)Ngwazi Professor Dr Bingu wa Mutharika  renamed the district.

That up now most people still call the place Chikwawa, and not Chikhwawa, goes to emphasize how much people do silently resist changes that they were not consulted about and they do not endorse. Of course, as expected, Malawi’s official government documents have both versions and nobody seems to bother that one place cannot have two official names.

We are in Mulanje for a breather at a place called Hafu-wani.  We like the Hafu-wani hotel, inn, motel, lodge, or resthouse. Friendly staff, essentially the servant-sisters, have been assisting us in that typical Lhomwe style. 

Since we arrived here, we have spent the evenings watching international television stations’ coverage of the death of the Queen of the United Kingdom and life head of the Commonwealth.  We have learned through the broadcasts that the late Queen of the United Kingdom was head of state of that kingdom for seventy years, or seven decades, and the longest serving head of that state called the United Kingdom.

During part of that period, the seventy years, she had been head of state of all British Colonial Territories, countries now calling themselves the commonwealth as if there is anything common about their state of wealth.  We recalled having read that it was during her head-of-stateship of the British Colonial Territories, that unarmed Nyasaland protesters marching for their independence and freedoms were massacred – or human rights, to use today’s correct political terminology. For over 60 years of her reign, no apology was ever proffered.

In her role as head of state, she assented to bills passed by parliaments in the United Kingdom, and, some say, even in Canada, Australia, and many other small countries located in the Carribean.  We have also learnt that she earned salaries, not only from the United Kingdom, but also from elsewhere she had the authority to assent (or reject) to bills passed in those countries’ parliaments.

Surprisingly, we have also heard some mourners say that her role was ceremonial. We have laughed out loud and to tears. If assenting to laws and being paid for assenting to those laws is a ceremonial political act, then the British, and others, still have problems understanding what lies behind laws. Laws are power. Those who sign bills into laws give are powerful. 

The bills the Queen of the United Kingdom signed into laws sent people to jail, authorized wars, gave people some freedoms, and denied some people some freedoms. Ceremonial? Then all heads of state are ceremonially powerful.

What we have not heard while ‘resting peacefully’ here at Hafu-wani is someone condemning her for staying in power for too long. The mourners seem actually to be thankful for her 70 years as their head of state.  

Now imagine how much people condemn heads of state that stay in power for years. If the late Queen of the United Kingdom were an African, Asian, Chinese, Russian, Latin American, or North Korean head of state, she would have been called an autocrat, a dictator, and many other despicable names reserved for ‘other’ heads of state than the United Kingdom ones.

One evening, over dinner and a bottle of fantakoko, we wondered what Joyce Banda, the president of Malawi who succeeded our beloved (ka)Ngwazi Bingu wa Mutharika, did to rectify the fuel and electricity problems that had bedeviled Malawi during (ka)Ngwazi’s time and ten wasted years before that.

What did she do to magically reverse the scandalous fuel and electricity situation in Malawi?

We remembered that in fact it was her who came up with the idea of fuel ‘silos’ in Mzuzu, Lilongwe, and Blantyre to ensure that Malawi never run out of fuel again. The fuel ‘silos’ are now NOCMA assets. 

But what did she do to ensure electricity, expensive as it is, was available for the whole of her two years in power?  Why is her magic not being used two years into the current government, to which she belongs?