Africa-Press – Malawi. In this brief article, I attempt to point out what I believe is the biggest misconception when it comes to developing a poor country like Malawi. First, a disclaimer: Malawi has its fair share of corrupt leaders. Every corrupt leader must be punished to the full extent of the law. Those charged with corruption must be afforded a fair and quick trial.
Now let us get into it. There has been a misconception that developing a poor country into rich country simply requires honest and good people. The thinking goes something like this: if we just had good selfless leaders who were not corrupt, Malawi would be very rich today.
It is true that corruption is an impediment to development; corruption should be eradicated. However, the reality is a little bit more complicated than that. Having good people in leadership positions and/or eradication of corruption are good things, but they do not automatically translate into prosperity for a country.
Just before the talk of multiparty politics in the early nineties, Malawi was on a roll. The economy was booming; the manufacturing industry was blossoming – digital wristwatches and radios were being manufactured locally. For the first time everybody in the villages could afford at least a pair of plastic shoes. Those plastic shoes had a ‘Made in Malawi’ stamp on them.
Somehow the booming economy opened people’s eyes to something that had been going on for nearly 30 years – total disregard of human rights by the government. Naturally, people wanted a society that was free and democratic. After a referendum and the first ever multiparty elections, H.E. Bakili Muluzi and his UDF party formed a government. The rest, as they say, is history.
By the end of 10 years of the UDF rule, if one corrects for natural advancement due to time, Malawi had actually moved backwards. The development trajectory on which H.E. Dr Kamuzu Banda’s economy was in 1994 would have put Malawi at a far higher level in 2004 than it actually achieved under Muluzi.
A lot has been said about how most of the infrastructure (including school classrooms, hospitals, roads, etc.) built under Muluzi had almost collapsed by the time he left office, while those built by Kamuzu were still standing.
It turned out when people looked at the Kamuzu regime they only saw the pain. They did not see the unique vision and strategy Kamuzu had for the country. Yes, the pain was real, and people were right to look for a new leader. Unfortunately, when people went to look for new leaders, they only emphasized on the importance of the qualities Kamuzu lacked. Somehow the belief was that if they could find a leader who had the qualities Kamuzu lacked, then that leader would bring those needed qualities and, at the same time, automatically replicate everything else Kamuzu was good at.
That new leader was Bakili Muluzi, the man of the people. It turned out things did not work out quite as good as people had expected. By the time Kamuzu died – only a few years into the Muluzi presidency – there was genuine mourning in the country for what people believed was a great leader.
Yes, Malawi needed to change in 1994. The MCP had lost touch, was corrupt and did not respect human rights. However, in choosing a replacement, people should have recognized the importance of competency. It is not enough to choose just good people to be leaders. In order to develop, a country must have good and ‘capable’ leaders. The mistake Malawians made in 1994 is still being made today.
Improving the economy of any country is a very difficult tough exercise. It is even orders of magnitude tougher to change a poor country into a rich country. It will require robust strategies and vision to just nudge Malawi forward in terms of real development.
Malawians are not alone in overlooking the importance of capability in leadership. In a very shocking speech to miners in South Africa in August last year, Joseph Manthunjwa, the current head of the South African Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union said the following about the Apartheid government,
“Love them or hate them – the Afrikaners, but they gave us a country that was functional. The white Afrikaners gave us a functional state. And as much as the white National Party was cruel to humanity, they left us with a functioning state”.
“Where is the railway today? Where is the South African Airways today? Where is the healthcare system today? Even though during apartheid there was a board that said, ‘white only’ and ‘black only’, but when you entered that door that was written black, you would get all the medicine you needed. Today there are no white [only] or black [only boards], but there is also no service”.
This statement is shocking because it came from the leader of a premier anti-apartheid organization in South Africa. During apartheid, the miners actively fought hard for a better life for black South Africans, and they were right. The story of black liberation in apartheid South Africa without mentioning the story of miners. Their role in bringing down the oppressive apartheid government will always be honored.
Unfortunately, just like Malawians, anti-apartheid South Africans too assumed that competency and merit did not matter as long as you brought in good people to run the show. After all, they were doing the all-important work of diversity and inclusion. This attitude was captured in the now famous presidential debate between Nelson Mandela (ANC) and F.W. de Klerk (National party) of April 15, 1994.
When de Klerk pointed out that the ANC plan was too ambitious and unworkable, Mandela sarcastically brushed him off as a man “not used to addressing the basic needs of the majority of the population…”
De Klerk famously shot back with a prophetic statement: “Let me say Mr. Mandela, my comments were not the comments of a man who is less candid. They were the comments of somebody with experience; of somebody who sat in cabinet and worked through budgets since 1978 and who knows how the economy of the state works”.
It is dangerous to assume that a country, with good but incapable leaders, is guaranteed to succeed so long as it is liberated from colonialism, apartheid, dictatorship, or even corruption. Merit should not be regarded as a relic of apartheid, colonialism, one-party dictatorship or sexism.
Malawi has been given a slightly worse hand than other nations of the world, thereby making it even tougher to develop. Malawi does not have minerals and is not strategically important to the powerful nations. Also, incidentally, unlike most prosperous developing countries, Malawi jumped into multiparty democracy before fixing her economy.
Democracy is the best system of government in the world, and Malawi needs to keep improving its democracy. However, the fact remains that there has never been a country that was very poor that suddenly became rich because of changing to multiparty democracy. Even Rwanda, which is often cited as a ‘miracle of Africa’, is for all practical purposes a dictatorship – not to mention the immense aid rich nations continue to pour in that country in sympathy for the genocide a few decades ago. All this means that Malawians need to start putting much emphasis on competence when choosing leaders. The long lines at filling stations, the skyrocketing prices in shops, the crumbling infrastructure, the chaos and confusion in governance, are what they call “unforced errors’ in the game of tennis. These problems should not have been there BUT for incompetent leadersh
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