Political Index Feature

Propaganda Pulls Backwards

Great leaders desire only to serve, not to lead, observes Myles Munroe, a best-selling author and a widely acknowledged expert in leadership matters.

But because of the passion, Munroe adds, focus, relentlessness, tirelessness, consistency and the commitment they display in the selling, promotion, pursuit and elaboration of their vision, they inspire and motivate a trusted following that embraces and shares their vision and eventually chooses them to lead the cause despite their reticence.

Sadly, these qualities and traits have not only been non-existent in post-Hastings Kamuzu Banda Malawi ‘pseudo-leaders’ but never been cultivated or aggressively encouraged.

Thus, since Malawi embraced multiparty politics in 1993, the country in Bakili Muluzi, Bingu wa Mutharika and the sitting President Joyce Banda has had not only a visionless democracy but a heartless ‘theft-o-cracy’.

To fortify their cult status, generated from one’s ego, a slow-on-the-uptake populace and fraudulent public institutions, the three leaders have exercised propaganda that is anathema to visionary leadership.

Propaganda strategy

Propaganda is the name given to something written or spoken with the intention of making people believe what the writer or speaker wants them to believe. It is often unscrupulous, making use of various manipulative techniques to propagate a particular doctrine or practice.

Propaganda works in more than 10 ways.

First, the propagandist uses facts to give the assertion credibility, but selects only those facts convenient to the purpose.

President Banda is not spared of this propaganda strategy.

For merely notifying government in his solidarity statement at this year’s commemoration of May 1 Labour Day Celebration in Blantyre that it hastily implemented International Monetary Fund (IMF) prescriptions through a combined dose of 49 percent currency devaluation; floatation of the kwacha and removal of fuel subsidies, the Council for Non-governmental Organisations in Malawi (Congoma) board chairperson Voice Mhone riled the President who publicly accused Mhone of giving contradictory information to what ‘experts’ are advising government.

In further reaction to Mhone’s and many others’ fair-minded remarks on the country’s economy, the President and her crawlers when officiating at numerous public functions, including the opening of the budget session of Parliament on Friday, May 17 in Lilongwe, while admitting that Malawi’s economy has been going through some of the toughest times in its history, are telling the nation that things have started going the right direction as evidenced by reduced pump fuel prices. They add that the kwacha is appreciating against major foreign currencies and factories have started operating full scale, among others.

Certainly, theirs are facts, but the truth only selected from many other ominous economic signs.

Mhone and colleagues are possibly right that while we have embraced liberal IMF policies, some caution is necessary in making prices stable.

The kwacha appreciation, given that it is floated, is in all probability temporary. Once the tobacco—the country’s economy mainstay—season is over and with elections coming, for example, the economy will go back to recession and things may worsen as government embarks on populist spending to win votes and may forget basics that have to be considered to stabilise the local currency.

Visionless leaders

The heartbreaking thing is that the Malawi economy is still driven by the same visionless people who failed to take us out of the same mess during the Mutharika administration.

Second, the propagandist identifies an enemy as a specific target for hatred and anger, thereby providing a focus for aggression, and distracting attention from weaknesses or shortcomings of individuals within the propagandist’s own group.

This propaganda strategy is also found in Joyce Banda’s and her toadies’ tactics to discredit her critics.

Perhaps the following most revealing case study can be useful for illustrating this point.

The public have a right to know how government officials (including the First Citizen) handle matters on behalf of the overstrained taxpayers. This underpins an important element of fiscal transparency and good governance in a democratic set-up.

And the Malawi media have just somewhat performed one of its core duties in a democratic society— to inform the citizenry without fear or favour about matters that concern them.

It is through the media that Malawians know, as it stands, the Office of the President and Cabinet is mired in one scam after another: maize scams, a humongous oil scam, Farm Input Subsidy Programme contracting scams, drugs contracting scams, pay-out scams, and so forth.

The President might have waged war on such ‘theft-o-cracy’, but it is not to any reasonable measure to the majority way of thinking.

Instead, the President recently elected to make clear and public her disdain of the whistle-blowers (the media), calling them ‘murderers’ who killed her predecessor Mutharika.

Despite their weaknesses, however, the media are not an enemy of development, which has eluded Malawi for almost 50 years since independence, as Banda would want the country to perceive them.

Healing the economy

The media have not prevented the President from putting into place informed and deliberate polices that will grow and invigorate the ailing Malawi economy and bring some measure of fiscal sense in Malawians’ livelihoods. The media have not prevented the President from demonstrating her intolerance for scams and abuse of taxpayers’ resources in her office just as US President Barack Obama (one of Banda’s pin-ups) did lately in a press statement released by the White House in reaction to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal that locked Washington DC.

The media’s and the citizenry’s constitutional expectation is that the President will provide strong, steady, visionary, ethical and sacrificial leadership rather than practising unsustainable ‘free-o-logy’ economics, as currently is the case, where Malawians are promised or encouraged to survive on free maize, free flour, free cows, free education, free fertilisers, free seeds, free bwam’noni, etc., hence squeezing further only some taxpayers to fund such disbursements.

So, when the President appears ‘clueless’ and hooked on World War I economic indicators which for decades have failed to graduate people from poverty to wealth, she should understand the public’s, the media inclusive, discomfiture with the situation and their remonstrations and not expect them to endure in silence like ‘lambs being led to the slaughterhouse’.

Banda’s ‘charging’ of the media with ‘murder’ will not improve the pale Malawi economy.

Neither will any propaganda divert people’s attention from the real economic suffering they are going through nor the dearth of ethical and sacrificial leadership they are facing.

Propaganda manoeuvres but backwards and will only leave lasting emotional and physical scars on the majority governed that will prove difficult to treat and heal.

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