On being rattled by poll findings

Hon. Folks, it seems harder though he tried, APM could not bear the fact that voters in his own home turf, Thyolo, do not trust him that much according to recent Afro Barometer poll findings.

How else should we read his castigation of the pollsters themselves when he went to address the so-called development rally there some days ago?

You and me—and most likely the President himself—know that Afro Barometer have used the sampling method (in which a carefully selected group is chosen to represent the population being polled) before to produce results that reflected the 2009 and 2014 election outcomes.

Interestingly, in both cases, DPP and its presidential candidates—first the late Bingu and later his younger brother, APM—were poised to win by almost exactly the same margin as Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) later declared after the actual elections.

Isn’t it ironic then, that APM today can question the credibility of the same Afro Barometer, suggesting instead that they belong to a Zomba clique that is out there to discredit him with cooked-up polls?

But, in case the folks in Afro Barometer are baffled by the political reaction of HE to their cherished “objectively” conducted polls using a well-tested research method in social science, we, in the media, can simply say, ‘welcome to the real world’.

It is a world where a messenger is always expected to relay the positive message, true or false. Anyone determined to relay only what they know to the best of their abilities as true risk being castigated or worse.

Don’t ever assume the so-called democrats of today are in any way different from Kamuzu Banda. To them all, the message is not true unless it does not describe how the ripe pimple on their nose contorts the look of their otherwise smooth face.

That said, if I were APM, or one of his multitudinous so-called advisors, I would realise that the lost trust cannot just be regained by shooting from the belt, the American cowboy-style, at the messenger. Not when the President rose on a mere 37 percent vote, largely garnered from populous fellow Alhomwe of the South, thanks to first-past-the-post voting system!

The waning trust may indicate that APM has not met the high (and probably unrealistic in these hard economic times) expectations of folks who anticipated a tangible reciprocal gesture for their loyalty. Don’t they say charity begins at home?

Take the late Bingu, for example. There is a litany of accomplishments for which all of us as a nation benefitted equally—economic growth of his first term, fertiliser subsidy, a quest for a cheaper route to the coast, etc.

But there are also things he did, or bull-dozed, just to satiate the charity-begins-at-home expectation of his home base, Thyolo or Ndata to be precise. The magnificent Villa Casa Blanca replete with a multi- billion kwacha dome-shaped Mpumulowa Bata Mausoleum reinforced a sense of belonging.

The folks of Thyolo saw in Bingu not just a State President as the rest of us did, but also a son of the very soil they tilled year after year.

Add to this the Malawi University of Science and Technology (Must), which Bingu wrestled from its initial location, Lilongwe, to be planted right on his Ndata Farm and the hushed upgrade of a footpath connecting Thyolo and Midima roads (oops, Robert Mugabe Highway) into much wider tarmac road, and you begin to see clearly the political twine strings he used to hold on to the trust of his home base, Thyolo.

It is the same principle Kamuzu used to win the trust of his fellow Chewa of Kasungu and the entire Central Region. In Kasungu, his home, he built the magnificent Nguru-ya-Nawambe presidential palace which he never really used and later the Kamuzu Academy. He also built a modern Chiwengo Village which could compare favourably with a modern township in Blantyre or Lilongwe.

As for the Centre, he too wrestled the Capital City from Zomba in the South to Lilongwe. These are political “artefacts” for which even the latter-day MCP President Lazarus Chakwera knows his tenure is safer with a Kamuzu badge on his lapel!

He also knows the party’s women would dance at his rallies if only he can tolerate their attire on which is still printed Kamuzu’s face despite that he had already quit active politics by the time he died 18 years ago.

By contrast, APM seems somewhat lost in the maze of conflicting political interests. He probably appreciates that he rose on the shoulders of tribal politics but somewhat wished his home folks “understood” he belongs equally to all Malawians. Isn’t this what “civilised politics” is all about?

As a scholar, he also knows that blatant favouring of his home-base will only raise the tempo of calls for cessation or federation. Should that happen on his watch, it would be a real stinker on his legacy.

So, which way APM? My take is that he should only downplay the significance of waning trust in Thyolo if he has what it takes to build bridges with the folks who denied him the vote in 2014. Bingu did exactly that in 2004 and it paid great dividends in 2009.

But if that appears to be as hard as climbing the Sapitwa peak on Mulanje Mountain, then give the folks of Ndata much more than elevating a hardly known village headman to become a politically-appointed paramount chief of Alhomwe.