Back Bencher

Gaps that need filling

Honourable Folks, APM has been praised for a lean 20-member Cabinet. He’s also been praised for public sector reforms.

He’s been bashed— and I dare say rightly so—for surrounding himself with almost as many advisers as the ministers, creating an inner circle of a hodgepodge of respectable professionals and opportunists to boot who, during Bingu’s reign, scaled the Everest in making the DPP look like a political party from hell.

Will they change? Time will tell.

APM’s emphasis on rewarding merit is a good start. Imagine, telling the technocrats in government any reward will be performance-based and not for patronising presidential functions!

Starting with Kamuzu Banda, Bakili Muluzi, Bingu wa Mutharika and Joyce Banda—the presidents of the Malawi of the past 50 years—premium was on loyalty. Using the presidential prerogative to fire without having to justify their action, they inculcated enormous fear in the poor folks they elevated to the Cabinet or high offices in government.

In turn, ministers, principal secretaries and other senior officials in government came to realise that their security of tenure hinged on flattering the boss with sweet lies and praises, supporting anything the boss said and travelling kilometres just to attend any presidential public function.

Still, all APM’s predecessors did not play God from the word go. They all started on a good note only to end up loathed by a disappointed electorate. Reason: power.

The good president they created in campaign rhetoric had a very short life-span. When power exuded its intoxicants, the good democratic president in them gradually succumbed to corruption, allowing the real president—very cold and corrupt to boot—to emerge and blindly pursue more and more power at the expense of even their own legacy.

We’ll therefore have to wait and see if, as years pass by, APM will still champion merit. That’s when we can salute him as the game-changer.

Already, APM’s appointment pattern has raised eye-brows. With only three women in a 20-member Cabinet, coupled with appointments in the civil service which are equally biased against women, there’s a reason to fear that Malawi may be going backwards on gender equality.

Whatever good reasons APM has for that, the fact remains that there can’t be much progress on human development—the improvement of living standards—which is key to national development in its broader sense, if women are on the receiving end of a development agenda mooted, justified and executed largely by men.

Change means accepting that gender equality isn’t just a human rights or cultural issue. Rather, it is also at the centre of the development agenda.

Another issue that seems to be poorly handled is how to ensure that after elections, the energies of all of us, whether we voted for the party in government or parties in opposition, are reinvigorated and used to speed up the development of our country. One way of doing that is by bringing back self-help programmes. People are more likely to take better care of a school block for which they sweated for than that which came as a 100 percent “gift” from government or donors.

Then there is also the problem of concentration of power within the South, particularly among the Lhomwe, APM’s tribe. Whatever is its academic and legal justification, politically, it’s alienating the majority 65 percent who did not vote for DPP.

A discerning mind would note that, probably for the first time, the call for a federal government has been echoed within the leadership of MCP, the main opposition party with the Centre as its stronghold.

Although arguments for a federal system are premised on ensuring “equitable development” by devolving power, I would like to believe that, in the wake of decentralisation, a federal system is mainly for self-determination. Nobody wants to be bystander in the exciting process of shaping one’s own destiny and let others with power decide what constitutes equitable development.

We all want to be represented where decisions affecting the only country we call home are made. Call that the power dynamics of a heterogeneous society. If APM disagrees, then trust me, a federal system of government is a matter of when and not if.

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