Reflections from reading William Kamkwamba's Story

For a change, I read something with very little political content this past week- William Kamkwamba's "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind". (There is some politics in the book, as William freely shows his admiration for the Banda and Mutharika governments while showing his open disdain for the Muluzi regime, but that is a minor part of the overall story).

I have to say it has been very heartwarming to read William's story instead of the usual depressing stories about Malawi politics and the self-centred individuals who populate the Malawi political stage.

William's is a moving story and one that has received commentary in far more influential sites than this humble blog. But it is a moving read, a story that serves as a demonstration of what is possible despite the great obstacles that many of Malawian peoples encounter every day. In William's case, he shows great determination and overcame great obstacles in the quest to realize his dreams...drought and the subsequent hunger and starvation visited on his family and community in Wimbe, Kasungu; being forced to drop out of school because of lack of school fees; an un-supportive community who took his explorations on creating a windmill as a sign of madness. Against all these odds, here was William, a young boy that could hardly read or speak English and certainly not schooled in the physics of electricity generation, who still demonstrated his natural brilliance to come up with his invention and generate light for his home by simply looking at pictures from a library book .
In a country where very few have access to electricity from an unreliable power grid, William's ingenuity offers an important lesson in that there are many Malawian geniuses of his calibre that are capable of coming up with local solutions to Malawi's myriad development challenges. Just imagining what is possible if all the William Kamkwambas of Malawi could be given support to unleash their creativity....no more unsafe drinking water; no more reliance on imported fertilizers; maybe some car designers that can build new cars locally and turn us into an exporting nation....some coming up with new medicines to cure us from disease and share with others outside Malawi the fruits of their discovery...the possibilities are infinite.
Sadly, the limited opportunities in our education system which prevents many William Kwamkwambas from emerging and nurturing their potential means that many inventors are out there that are not afforded the opportunities to invent. Yet, William's story teaches us more than the potential that Malawi has: it also tells us that despite countless obstacles, it is still possible to dream and translate those dreams into reality. Though belated, William, I salute you and am proud to count myself as your fellow Malawian.

The World is Watching Mr President Mutharika - Change

From the Editorial entitled "Wake up wa Mutharika" in Mmegi newspaper of Botswana, April 6, 2011:

"Mr president it is most outrageous of you to say that demonstrations are a privilege and that you want demonstrators to pay between K2.5 million to K5 million (P108,300-P542,000) to stage a demonstration. From what is happening in the Arab world, you know what happens to leaders who repress the human soul. Finally we call on you Mr president to respect the rule of law. The wanton disregard for court orders by your regime is proof that you have derailed in a big way. It is time for you to introspect and go back to the people of Malawi with a view to making amends. Our brothers and sisters in Malawi and SADC cannot afford to have a failed state and it is upon you to ensure that they will not"

read the entire comment on the Mmegi Online website at:
Mmegi Online: Wake up wa Mutharika

...and let he who has ears hear!!

Bordering on Giving Up....

I have very fond memories growing up in the Thyolo Tea plantations, running to school in the mist of cold mornings in our green and khaki school uniforms...
Now, because someone with questionable sanity usurped the trust of Malawians and turned it into a tool for nepotism, all of us Thyolo people are being caricatured as nepotistic individuals. In the spirit of the old Chewa proverb, nsomba ikaola imodzi, zonse zaola (when one fish is rotten in the basket, chances are all are rotten), all of us Lomwe people from Thyolo are- understandably - painted in the same brush.
One wonders what the future holds for the current generation of young minds currently running to their schools in the same tea plantations we used to wonder in days gone by: Will they forever be perceived in the lens of their ethnicity? Will they be trusted again? Will they have to pay for the sins of this our generation? Will they be given the opportunities we have been fortunate to have?
The pronouncements of the Man who is supposed to be Chancellor of the University of Malawi and his defence of the Inspector General's despicable actions, makes our jobs all the more difficult. I am sure it makes the job of the professional managers of the University more difficult as his pronouncements and decrees make dialogue impossible. Or does he really care?
Now, I am beginning to question, do I want to go back to that? How can I seriously go and stand in front of my students and have to censor what I teach? Indeed, Can I even go back when my closest friend and colleague has been as badly treated as Blessings has been? Indeed, are our services even needed at all?
One thing I know for sure is that I will not give in to threats. Like my colleagues, I refuse to be intimidated.
I am passionate about my country. It has given me so much and there is not enough I can give back in return....But maybe, it is time to reconsider whether the country needs what little I have to offer. Maybe I should start looking at those classified ads sections again and look for opportunities elsewhere?

Of clueless and incompetent Cabinet Ministers- Peter Mutharika and George Chaponda among the most incompetent

I don't usually criticize Malawi Cabinet Ministers. This is not because they do a great job- far from it. The simple truth is that over the years, I have come to expect very little from them. Why else would I expect so much from a bunch whose primary qualification appears to be their ability to shout the most in praising the President and showing up at each and every presidential function? Coupled with the fact that ours is a politics where the president wields so much power and influence that non-performance of government ministries and departments is always blamed on the president and not the responsible ministers?
I should add here that this is not a new tradition. In the first year of Malawi's independence, the country's first president, the late Hastings Kamuzu Banda, demonstrated his strong intolerance for independent minds in his Cabinet when he crashed with a group of progressive political upstarts such as Henry Chipembere, Kanyama, Yatuta Chisiza, Orton Chirwa, Willie Chokani and others and dismissed them from his Cabinet. In the years that followed, Banda's presidency thrived on the appointment of praise-singers into Cabinet, with Ministers fighting to be seen as the loudest and most noteworthy hero-worshippers of Banda.
Although Bakili Muluzi's tenure as president in the mid 1990s started off with the appointment of what could be considered as a truly meritocratic cabinet, he very quickly fell back into the old trap of seeking to place the presidency at the centre stage of Malawi politics. Merit was soon abandoned and replaced with political expediency. Like his predecessor, Muluzi began to appoint individuals on the basis of their ability praise him.
Exit Muluzi, enter Mutharika. At his first swearing in ceremony in 2004, Mutharika intimated that he would only appoint individuals into cabinet on merit. However, over time, this has been nothing more than mere rhetoric. Instead Mutharika has continued with the tradition of appointing praise-singers into Cabinet while ostracizing those that are perceived as political threats. As a result, we find individuals such as Charles Mchacha, Billy Kaunda, Vuwa Kaunda, Aaaron Sangala, Nicholas Dausi, among others, becoming permanent features of Cabinet while the likes of Goodal Gondwe, the late Moses Chirambo, among others, faced the chop. I dare say if one Roy Comsy was still an MP, he would have been one of the bozos retained in the Mutharika Cabinet!
Anyway, I therefore need to be excused for not having high expectations of Malawi's Cabinet Ministers. Even when so many commentators took the view that Mutharika's new Cabinet after the 2009 elections included highly learned and qualified individuals, I still took a deem view. And if the truth is to be told, some of the disappointments have been exactly the supposedly very learned Ministers.
Among the worst disappointments, in my view, is one George Chaponda. Despite his acclaimed academic qualifications, Chaponda's incompetency continues to befuddle the mind. This is an individual who, as Minister of Local Government in 2006, said Local Government Elections were unnecessary because the absence of councillors was not being felt. For a Minister who was appointed to champion local government, such myopia was unforgivable to the extent that I and my colleague, Harold Ngalawa, called for his immediate resignation in our Sunday Times of 28th May 2006. Of course, Chaponda never resigned and continued to enjoy the confidence and trust of his boss, Bingu wa Mutharika.
So the fact that in recent times, Chaponda has 'fouled' Malawi's image by wrongly suggesting that the provision on fouling the air that was part of the recent local courts bill included the banning of farting did not come as a surprise to me. It was frankly terrible that an entire Minister of Justice did not read the bill which had already been circulated to Members of Parliament by his own Ministry. This spectacle not only demonstrated the casual approach that we have in making laws, but it also goes to shed some insights into the laissez-faire attitude of Cabinet in fulfilling its responsibilities. In a normal world, Chaponda would have tabled the bill in Cabinet for extensive discussions. Only when cabinet was satisfied should the bill have been sent for debate in Parliament. And yet, when the line minister had not read the bill, it beggars belief to think that the other Cabinet Members bothered to read it either or that there was any deliberation over it in Cabinet. But, well, Chaponda still enjoys the confidence of his boss, never mind the embarrassment he has caused to the country.
Chaponda's incompetence however, pales in significance compared to that of the man he swapped ministries with, Peter Mutharika, currently the Minister of Education. This supposedly second coming of Moses, as we are being made to believe, comes across to me not only as aloof, but also clueless of what is going on in his ministry. While students at both Chancellor College and the Polytechnic have been out demonstrating over unpaid allowances; my fellow academics at Chancellor College get besieged by the Police; primary school teachers are in revolt over a poorly thought of policy on hardship allowances - the younger Mutharika goes on to claim that he he has no knowledge about what is happening at the colleges and about the striking primary school teachers.
Given that these events have received wide media coverage, I can only assume that the fact that Peter Mutharika knows nothing about them means the guy cannot read and has no advisors to read on his behalf. For someone who professes to be an Academic, the younger Mutharika's handling of events in the Education Ministry has been nothing but a disaster. He could, for example, have intervened very quickly when the Inspector General of Police unwisely decided to interrogate my friend and colleague, Blessings Chinsinga over the content of his lectures. This issue could have been quickly defused if this supposed Professor of Law jumped in and defended his fellow academics from the attempts of Mukhito to take Malawi back to the dark days of interference of academic freedom.
A forward looking Minister of Education should have foreseen that the policy of discriminatory payments of hardship allowances to teachers was bound to cause problems when all teachers in the country- including both those in urban and rural settings- are grossly underpaid. One could make the argument for example, that urban teachers need more resources to cover their rentals and the generally higher cost of living there compared to rural areas. Instead of this stupid policy, government could have offered some forms of general allowances, such as chalk allowance (teachers), risk allowances (medical staff) payable to all civil servants in these lines of work.
But maybe this is expecting too much from a man that we are supposed to coronate as our new Brother President come 2014. You would think Malawi has other better qualified and more competent people than these jokers. Perhaps the fact that the younger Mutharika, despite his obvious limited leadership abilities, is the best that Malawi has to offer, is no more than a reflection of the intellectual limits of the country? I wonder.

Politics of Poverty of Ideas: With Guest Author, Blessings Chinsinga

Blessings is still talking. Not even the recent police threats will silence him. Meanwhile, Lecturers at Chancellor College have demonstrated their solidarity with Blessings and also refuse to be silenced. Elsewhere, it in the world, Dictators are on notice. The people will neither be silenced nor will they be cowed. "Vox populi est Vox Dei:" - the voice of the People is the Voice of God.
The following piece from Blessings appeared in the Sunday Times of February 20, 2011. BD

The Poverty Of Ideas

Ideas are at the heart of progress in any sphere of endeavour. Without ideas, the world would virtually come to a standstill. However, ideas have to be competitive in order to steer progress. Any attempt to ‘monotholize’ ideas is disastrous. Even at an individual level, such an attempt can only result in stagnation, if not retrogression.

This reminds me of what one of our Reverends at Zomba CCAP used to say in most of his sermons and I quote “each individual is a walking civil war”. In other words, an individual is a bundle of contradictions which in the final analysis in an epitome of progress. To sin or not sin, one engages in some kind of debate. Rarely is sin not a product of rather protracted debates in our minds.

Ideas are particularly powerful in the world of politics. The evolution of political systems from monarchies through autocracies to democracies is a product of an open contestation of ideas. As Plato would argue, no political order is stable. In his conception of the paradigm of the cycle of change, Plato argues that no political system, even the so called mature democracies, is perfect. People are always searching for the best possible state of society that can harness their creativity to the fullest for meaningful and dignified lives.

This inevitable because according to Plato each society is beholden to the law of degeneracy. The degree to which the law of degeneracy embattles society is very much dependent on whether it entertains is a free market place for ideas or not. The free flow and let alone contestation of ideas allows a society to constantly renew itself. In other words, a society is constantly adjusting itself to new sets equilibria which allows it to fully exploit its potential.

Not many societies would claim to have reached such a stage. It is, of course, not difficult to do so but many leaders deliberately choose to frustrate progress by claiming monopoly of wisdom. They pretend they know it all. Even when the script is clearly off track, they are bold enough to project themselves as having all answers to the problems being experienced. And while some of the challenges are clearly beyond their grasp most of them are ironically self made.

There cannot only be one truth. This is evident even in the current thinking about development. In the era of post-modernism, there is no a universal path to development and prosperity. We can no longer talk of development but rather developments. This clearly underlies the primacy of the free market of ideas as a precursor of development and progress.

Consequently, a society that does not entertain alternative ideas, and in which the leadership projects itself as all knowing, catches up with the law of degeneracy rather rapidly. The decay is even much faster if a regime resorts to suppressing alternative ideas either covertly or overtly.

A regime that suppresses alternative ideas surely digs its own grave. Progress comes to a halt since this tendency creates a generalized and undefined sense of anxiety in the body politic which breeds fear and lack of self drive and innovation. The consequence is a culture of conformism which is an antithesis of progress. People simply do things to please the powers that be and not to take society to greater heights.

A society needs fresh ideas, debate and engagement at all levels in order to deal with pressing issues successfully. It becomes worrisome when there is clearly less tolerance to question the norms and values underpinning a society’s democracy. Invariably, universities suffer enormous decline as places for intellectual engagement and debates. They become centres of regurgitation instead of nodes for critical thinking which takes away from society the ability for Socratic questioning, accountability and responsibility.

As the law of degeneracy takes its toll, the public intellectual retreats especially if a regime falls prey to Macheviallian political tactics. Public intellectuals simply shut down. When we talk of public intellectuals, we are not talking only about those with links to institutions of higher learning.

Public intellectuals are everywhere. You can get them from all possible walks of life. They are in civil society, public service, private sector and even at community levels. These are simply individuals who are gifted with thinking outside the box. They are sources of new ideas that drive progress in various realms of life. Society benefits from engaging with their ideas in a civilized fashion even when they dare the mainstream thinking.

When public intellectuals shut down, a society experiences systemic failure. This is what ultimately breeds politics of poverty of ideas which is quite dangerous. There is often no going back even when it is very clear that a society is headed on an outright regressive trajectory. A society invariably finds itself stuck in an auto pilot mode since people are rewarded for conformity and dressed down for taking initiative that appears to threaten the status quo even when it is in the best interest of society.

Public intellectuals are indispensable since their role is to suggest alternatives, to make comparisons, to question orthodoxies, to interrogate motives so that an informed debate on public issues can take place. However, for this to happen, a society needs a new mindset, attitude and renewed energy besides progressive leadership.

Leaders have an important role to play in this revolution. Not any other type of leadership though; it requires a leadership that is well versed with the servant paradigm of leadership and genuinely believes in it. Primarily, incumbents must view leadership as a service to be provided to the people and not something to be exploited for selfish gains.

Not until then can leadership boldly challenge their followers that they cannot trade their nationality for any other place because their country is the best place on earth. This was a hit in Barack Obama’s recent State of Union address. How many leaders can boldly emulate Obama? Surely I can count them on my palm.

Mutharika's dictatorship hits a new low: Unima's Blessings Chinsinga summoned by Inspector General of Police

Things continue to get worse in Malawi on the governance front. The arrogance and disregard of the rule of law and people's rights demonstrated by the Mutharika regime continues unabated. This is despite recent donor actions to suspend aid due to poor governance as well as crippling shortages of fuel, forex, water and electricity, to mention but a few ills.
Now it has just come to my attention that my good friend and occasional contributor to this blog, Blessings Chinsinga, was this morning (12 February, 2011) summoned to appear before the Inspector General of Malawi Police to respond to allegations that he has been inciting students to demonstrate against the government.
Needless to say I am so mad to hear this story and enraged that the Bingu government is sinking so low as to threaten University academics with serious yet unfounded accusations. In any case, the right to demonstrate is enshrined under Section 38 of the Malawi Constitution so it should be no crime to even contemplate organizing one (as indeed is happening with the Monday demonstration organized by HRCC and others). To his credit, Blessings, is taking a more philosophical and reflective approach to this sad episode. I can only hope this does not silence him and other critics who courageously speak in defence of Malawi's hard-won democracy.
From my understanding of the matter at hand, it would appear the Inspector General is using students to act as informers on their lecturers and report any criticism of government made in the lecturer rooms. And judging by the fact that the IG had to travel all the well from Lilongwe to meet Blessings in Zomba suggests that the police hierarchy are taking these informants very seriously. Blessings' alleged 'crime' is to have given examples about the ongoing difficulties of lack of forex, fuel etc as examples of issues that can instigate the kind of demonstrations recently seen in Tunisia and Egypt.
In my view, the lecture room is the academic's sanctum - one needs to be free to speak and provide concrete, relevant and contemporary examples - preferably local ones - without the fear of being summoned bto appear before the Police. I have to say that inspite his ineptitude, the former President, Bakili Muluzi never resorted to such grotesque tactics to silence us. And we will not be silenced.

White Elephants: when World Inland ports are reduced to swimming pools

On 23rd October 2010, Malawi’s wise and dynamic leader, Ngwazi # 2, Bingu wa Mutharika, opened the Nsanje World Inland Port in the presence of the Presidents of Zambia and Zimbabwe (bringing back memories of the potential revival of the old Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland?).

Even if the small and unresolved issue of a feasibility study had not been conducted, the all-knowing reincarnation of the Ngwazi commissioned the start of the construction of the port at a reported cost of K3.9 billion. Well, even the simple fact the Mozambican government – in whose territory most of this new 238km route to the Indian Ocean passes - had not granted their full authorization for the project, Mutharika went ahead and invited his federal colleagues to join him in launching the project on that sunny and hot October morning.

It is now almost four months since that colorful launch and no single ship, nay, boat/badge is yet to arrive at Nsanje port. And if the above picture of the port taken in January 2011 is to be believed, no badges will be docking at Nsanje port in the near future.

At least the people of Nsanje have found other uses for the port.