INTRODUCTION
Politics, as usual,
has forced upon innocent Malawi a strange form of impasse following the declaration
of the incumbent, Peter Mutharika, as winner in the Tripartite Elections which
took place on May 21, 2019 in the country. Two opposition leaders, Lazarus
Chakwera of the Malawi Congress Party, MCP—the gentleman who came second—and
Saulos Chilima of the UTM—a young man who came third—have refused to accept the
results, alleging widespread irregularities. The two have since sought the
intervention of the High Court through its special arrangement—Constitutional
Court—to declare the poll invalid, and therefore order a rerun. Although the
issue is in Court, demands and counter-demands have been flying with Saulos
Chilima demanding the resignation of the Chairperson of the country’s Electoral
Commission, Jane Ansah, who also happens to be a Supreme Court Justice. Saulos
has since threatened to expose what he describes as the role she had played in
the claimed irregularities. His demand comes hot on the heels of the demand by
another grouping of lobbyists who gave her 14 days within which, they say, she should
leave office of her own accord. This grouping has since announced it is taking
to the streets on June 20, to force her out.
Supporters of
Lazarus Chakwera are already on the street, on their mouth a theme-song
“Mutharika must Fall!”. At one point, they went straight to Capitol Hill
offices, the Government of Malawi administrative seat in Lilongwe, jettisoning civil
servants from their offices. In the confusion, an outgoing United States
Ambassador to the country, Virginia Palmer, found herself in a torrent of teargas
canisters when she attended a confab with Lazarus Chakwera at the latter’s
offices at the headquarters of the MCP right there in Lilongwe. These things
are taking place within the context that the matter is in the Constitutional
Court and the nation is waiting with bated breath on the outcome.
What is interesting
in all this is the position public administrators and political scientists in
the country seem to advance, namely that this impasse should be considered a
momentous opportunity to engage in robust public administration reforms, and
for the people to extend their eyes beyond the single stroke of genius—the
outcome—of the Court. At the core of their message seems to be a call to peace,
patience and wisdom to ensure this challenge doesn’t escalate into a crisis.
I am in no way an
expert in governance or any of these matters, for I’m devoid of the knowledge
and education they possess. I am simply a citizen who loves his country and
considers peace the gem of existence. For the reason, I wish to attempt to
celebrate this peace by imitating the approach by these public administrators,
an approach I consider good for our beautiful nation at this hour. Once again, I
am no way claiming any expertise; I am an ordinary person with no name, commenting
on matters of his country through the window of the public administrator.
STRUCTURE OF THE DISCUSSION
First, I will
demonstrate why our resolve and faith shouldn’t falter in this impasse because
it is merely a challenge which we must, with great wisdom, understanding and
patience, overcome before it grows into a crisis. To demonstrate why we must
ensure peace is at the centre of every move we take when addressing this
challenge, I shall use the Arab Spring as a case study. This will help explain
the danger of letting ourselves interfere with state structures in the course
of resolving the impasse. The third section is nothing but a justification or
rationale for my preference of the public administrator’s all-encompassing,
broader approach to resolving the impasse. I contrast this with the perception
by many whose eyes are only set, firmly at that, on the single stroke of genius
of the Courts or simply the outcome. In other words, I will show the wisdom of
preparing ourselves beforehand to accept the outcome—whether it will be in our
favour or not, to lift this nation from the haunches of impasse. Within it, I
send some caution against putting too much faith in the conduct of politicians
and against finger-pointing, arguing that our problem lies in that we allowed
ourselves to disregard important recommendations to reform ourselves and our
electoral systems at all levels—individual, party, and national. I have
therefore included a section on the opportunities we missed to reform our
electoral system and how that this impasse stands to warn us against further deliberate
overlook. I have also made suggestions on the type of reforms we should embark
on to ensure our democracy flourish. This section is followed by advice on how
we should wait upon the outcome of the Court, i.e. with checked optimism so
that we should be able to accept with grace the outcome and move on as stewards
and stewardess of a nation set apart.
DISCUSSION
Challenge and Crisis
First, you will
notice that I prefer to call this post-election impasse a challenge rather than
a crisis or conflict. The reason is that a system fraught with challenges is
not automatically a system in crisis. In other words, challenges either have
first to accumulate considerably or affect the entire central nervous system of
the democratic system, for example, parliament, elections, and the political
community, for them to assume the description of a crisis (Merkel, 2018).
Challenges or an impasse becomes a crisis depending on “how political elites
and citizens handle the challenges that arise” (p. 13). This entails that it is
how citizens, the Court, the civil society organisations and political leaders
handle a challenge that determines whether it will eventually metamorphose into
a crisis. This phrasing is also good for our peace; it presents the matter as
an opportunity to mend ourselves rather than exchange physical postures. This
is why the next section discusses the power of restraint and patience when
seeking answers to resolve this impasse.
Patience and Restraint as a catalyst in the execution
of solutions to challenges
History is full of
stories of men and women who, without taking into account the full panoply of
peace and strategic thinking in seeking answers, ended up erecting projects
with unintended consequences. The Arab Spring or simply events in the Arab World,
for example, teach us that, no matter how promising a project might look,
anything outside the serious channels of dialogue is a script written in chaos.
The Arab Spring
simply refers to a “cluster of uprisings that took place in 2011 in the Middle
East and North Africa Regions, leading to changes in the status quo of the
government” (El-Hafez (2015, p. 2). The Arab Spring saw young people challenging
establishments to address such deficiencies as lack of political inclusion,
lack of jobs, corrupt governments, poverty, decline of the economy, and lack of
basic human rights. Countries most affected were Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen,
Bahrain, Libya, and Syria.
The Arab Spring started
in Tunisia where, on December 17, 2010, a young street vendor, Muhammad Bouazizi,
set himself alight after a female police officer had allegedly slapped him
after he had failed to pay a bribe. Other sources say Bouazizi had immolated
himself following frustrations with life in general. A month later, on February
11, 2011, the country’s President, Zine El Abedine Ben Ali resigned, ending a
twenty-three long reign. Two months later, in April 2011, the domino effect
fanning the uprisings in Egypt saw the President there arrested, ending
Mubarak’s long chapter of reign which had stretched from 1981. Soon, the Yemen
President, Ali Abullah Saleh resigned and left his country. In Libya, Muammar
Qadhafi was to be killed in a fight in October same year. The conflict soon
spread to Syria, where it is still raging albeit at a reduced rate since
President Assad has now managed to turn the tide.
The question we must
ask on all this is whether those uprisings eventually led to significant positive
changes in those countries. According to Kadri (2015, p. 1), they have not.
Kadri writes that “living conditions for the majority of the working population
in the Arab World have not changed for the better, and indeed, may have
worsened” (p. 1). He cites some evidence, namely that by early 2015, the food
prices there had remained at their highest since 2008, the standards for
resource allocation had remained the same, and several wars were ravaging the
region.
Similarly, sentiments
by Mona Abaza, an Arab writer, paint a gloomy picture of the events there. According
to Abaza, “The old regime has never really departed. . . Taḥrīr is not
repeatable and our present is not quite exactly identical to Mubārak’s time. It
is certainly much worse” (2016, p. 239).
From this it is
clear that removal of political or institutional actors rarely produce desired
results. There is an explanation for this.
According to Fraihat
(2016), removal or dismantling of power structures through force, rebellion or
mass mobilisation opens a Pandora’s Box. This is true even where such
structures were repressive and dictatorial. Fraihat gives the example of Iraq “where
the United States removed Saddam Hussein’s regime by force in a quick campaign
and then spent the following decade trying to piece the country back together,
to no avail” (p. 2).
Fraihat attributes
the problem to the complexity of the transition process, observing, “The
transition process that follows regime change is inherently complex and can
revive old, sometimes forgotten issues. Furthermore, making rapid changes to societies
that have largely stagnated due to decades without meaningful reforms often
generates new concerns” (p. 2).
Another explanation
on why it is impossible to maintain peace after a revolt lies in that these
uprisings or protests can never go so deep as to create completely new state
structures. Put simply, these uprisings can never reach the level of
revolutions no matter the attempts those ‘leading’ them can make.
Revolutions create
something new (Gunning & Baron, 2014, citing Halliday, 1999). All protests
do not aim at creating anything new; it is always replacing someone or
something with something. In most cases, those participating are not prepared
at all for what would happen after replacing their ‘enemy’. And, as soon as
this objective—removal of the ‘enemy’—is achieved, chaos emerges, new actors
with dissipated interests, flooding in, jostling for power. The lesson
therefore is simple here: be careful what you wish for. And for this reason, I
prefer the patient and intelligent approach to matters of peace and public
delivery in the manner of a public administrator.
The public administrator’s approach to impasse
On Friday, June 7,
2019, Saulos Chilima, leader of the UTM (Party), demanded the resignation of
Jane Ansah, the Electoral Commission Chairperson. Nandin Patel, a political
scientist commented on the matter, cautioning against judging the quality of
the elections from a single stage in the process. I think what she wants to
suggest by this is that election management is a chain of stages, and that our
understanding of this process must take into account each of these stages in
the process. Nandin has also called for patience, suggesting that we should
first wait upon the outcome from the Courts. Unfortunately, we only have one
Nandin; there should have been a thousand Nandins.
Other political
scientists have also commented on the importance of looking at this impasse as
an opportunity to revisit our frailties as a nation and so to begin on a new
journey to reform ourselves and our systems.
There must be some good
reasons why a public administrator considers an impasse an opportunity.
First, impasses,
like crises, “are by definition extraordinary in kind and/or scope, testing the
resilience of a society and exposing the shortcomings of its leaders and public
institutions” (Boin, McConnell and ‘T Hart, 2008, p. 3, citing Drennan and
McConnell, 2007). Leaders in society include chiefs, political party leaders,
and even those leading various civil society organisations and non-governmental
organisations. Thus, to a public administrator, crises or impasses reveal or
expose shortcomings which public policy must address for a better society.
It is said that
“most economic theories sprung into life as a response to a crisis, putting
aside previously held orthodoxies that failed to foretell or cope with the
shock” (Christodoulakis, 2015, p. 1). Crises or impasses help the public
administrator identify what works and what doesn’t so as to bring positive
change for public value and public interest. He or she therefore accepts chaos
and complexity as something to be understood and benefit from. In the words of Gharajedaghi
(2006), we tend to “see the world as increasingly more complex and chaotic
because we use inadequate concepts to explain it. [However, once] we understand
something, we no longer see it as chaotic or complex” (p. 25).
Public
administrators take their time to understand the chaos and complexity and glean
evidence from them to avert crisis. To do this, they look into history, the
society, law, and the future to avoid repeat of failure. This is why public
administrators talk of reforms for a positive change. They do not confront
chaos with chaos because evidence shows that projects bred in blood and chaos
only manage to beget more chaos and a false sense of dawn. One reason for this
is that such projects lack general acceptance or ownership.
The public
administrator’s ceaseless search for evidence supplies him or her with immense
energy and power of serendipity and foresight. He or she sees events from afar.
In some way, he or she carries the sixth sense, kind of society’s early-warning
system.
The vast
accumulation of evidence affords a public administrator one tool absent in many
professionals, namely the ability to balances over-confidence with reality. Simply
put, the public administrator knows the difference between bravery and folly,
immaturity and ego.
The public
administrator is always mindful of the fact that “not all of us are
enthusiastic about war, of course, but it takes only a few influential
enthusiasts to start one” (Johnson, 2004, p. 2). He or she warns the world to
watch out using the lens of law.
The public
administrator understands better the folly spirit of the
politician—overconfidence. How this pattern fits with what we have seen in the
just-ended elections is interesting. Everyone, even those with a handful of
followers kept posting narratives of going it alone to State House. They woke
up too late, the dream dead.
This array of
evidence affords the public administrator the pleasure of strategic
thinking—living the future today, kind of spirit of sustainability. The desire
for learning and wealth of evidence and knowledge gleaned makes the public
administrator’s mind a thinking machine, one never satisfied with the status
quo, and one open to diversity and more learning.
The open mind of the public administrator
The Public
administrator knows that politics is fluid and politicians a pretty strange
species altogether. He or she knows politicians speak their own language, and
makes every attempt to understand it bar swallowing it for gospel truth. There
are reasons for this. Dzimbiri (1998) knows it better.
We can learn from
Dzimbiri’s two intriguing stories of well-known politicians in the
country—Gwanda Chakuamba and Chakufwa Chihana—to appreciate the magnitude of fluidity
that is politics. These stories are a kind of caution against the gullibility
of putting all the society’s eggs in the one big basket of a politician.
According to
Dzimbiri, Chakuamba had once been condemned by the one party regime to 22 years
of hard labour where he eventually served only 13 years, as he was released
following the fall of the dictatorship after the June 1993 Referendum. Dzimbiri
writes that while in prison Chakuamba had joined the United Democratic Front
(the party that was to form the first multiparty government of the Second
Republic in 1994. Note that, politically speaking, the First Republic started
in 1966 and ended in 1993 following the Referendum when the Second Republic was
born). He further observes that, when the MCP came to ‘buy’ him at the alleged price
of K10 million, Chakuamba quickly dumped the UDF for the Malawi Congress Party,
the very party that had condemned him to prison, arguing “he had no excuse to
apologise to anyone for joining the MCP, that the UDF had wanted to treat him
as their ‘boy’, and that he had no choice when the MCP offered him prominent
portfolios” (p. 95).
On Chakuamba,
Dzimbiri concludes thus: “Most people were astounded that a man who had
suffered so much at the hands of the MCP and had denounced it (outright) would
go back to champion its very cause” (p. 96).
Of Chihana, leader
of the Alliance for Democracy, AFORD, since 1993 and a John Kennedy Human
Rights Award winner, Dzimbiri, writes that when Chihana lost the (1994
Presidential contest to Bakili Muluzi of the UDF), he signed a memorandum with
the MCP (represented by Gwanda Chakuamba) for the formation of the MCP/AFORD
Alliance. He writes that this had shocked many supporters of both parties,
foreign diplomats, and international organisations. For him, the question which
many observers asked was how AFORD, a clean party which had spurned the MCP
Team B (UDF), would embrace the party he had labelled ‘a party of death and
darkness’ (p. 97).
Dzimbiri says Chihana’s
political odyssey had not been over yet, for “two months after forming the
alliance with the MCP, he changed his mind and decided to accept a ministerial
post in the UDF Government, that of Minister of Irrigation and Water
Development, as well as the much criticised and widely talked about Second Vice
President portfolio” (p. 99).
The exploits
continued. According to Dzimbiri, “six months after the highly celebrated
launching of the UDF/AFORD coalition government, Chihana mounted a bitter
attack on his UDF counterparts, accusing them of massive corruption, nepotism
and bribery, threatening to pull out of the coalition” (p. 99). Dzimbiri says
that by June 1996, Chihana had resigned as Second Vice President and Minister
of Irrigation and Water Development, and had managed to pull AFORD out of the
UDF/AFORD coalition. End of story.
Today as I speak,
the majority of the MPs who were voted on independent ticket have already
promised to work with the ruling Democratic Progressive Party of Peter
Mutharika. Elsewhere, Peru, for example, this should have been an issue.
Lean (2012), writes
that in Peru, extraordinary election was held on April 8, 2001, following the
precipitous fall of President Alberto Fujimori. According to Lean, Fujimori was
a political outsider first elected in 1990 and went on to win a controversial
third term in 2000 in an election plagued with problems. Lena says that he was
however, forced to resign in disgrace when videotaped evidence surfaced to
prove that he was bribing opposition congress members to switch affiliations (Lean,
2012, p. 1).
That we ought to
follow politicians at a considerable distance is, universally speaking, good
insurance. I have something for you from Indonesia and the tale of
post-election impasse.
The elections in Malawi
coincided with those in Indonesia. There, seven days before the announcement
date, Fadli Zon, a member of the camp represented by the opposition
Presidential candidate, Prabowo Subianto-Sundiaga, said there was no way they
were going to contest the results in the country’s Constitutional Court. According
to Ghaliya and Ramadhani, (2019), Zon said history had taught them it never
works. The observation had come from a lesson on what had happened to them in
2014 when their camp had contested the Presidential results but it had proved
to be a waste of time.
“We did that (going
to the Courts) in the 2014 election, and we saw that the court was useless in
resolving the Presidential election dispute. . . There was a hearing marathon,
but they did not look at the evidence,” so said Zon.
In that country,
just as is the case in Malawi today, the team represented by the opposition
candidate Prabowo Subianto of the Gerindra Party had sought relief from the
Courts, arguing vote count was invalid and that cheating had taken place. And
according to Zon, it was simply a waste of time because though they had
collected 19 trucks of evidence, the Courts never used that evidence.
Fast-forward to
2019, and follow the April 17, 2019 Elections there involving 190 million
eligible voters. The incumbent, Joko Widodo of the PDI-P, is declared winner.
Unlike in Malawi, in Indonesia, they allow 35 good days between voting and
announcement of results, perhaps because of the magnitude of the load—190
million eligible voters.
Like what had
happened in Malawi, supporters of Subianto mounted a street rally to pressure
their electoral body to nullify the results. Over 450 rioters have since been
arrested.
Interestingly,
though Zon had said they would never seek the intervention of the Courts this
time, they have yet again gone the same route of Court. In short, on May 24, 2019,
they complained to the Constitutional Court that the vote was rigged. Like the
Malawi case, we should be waiting or we should learn from each other.
Back to Africa, the
post-election impasse in the Kenyan Election in 2017 should also serve as a reminder
that you can never read with mathematical accuracy the roving mind of a politician.
There in Kenya, on March 9, 2018, the country woke to an earthquake of news
when President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga shook hands on the steps of
Harambee House, a building which houses the country’s President’s office. This
handshake was a public declaration to cease all hostilities and to move forward
as one Kenya.
Uhuru and Raila had turned
sworn political enemies following those 2017 disputed elections. He rejected
Uhuru as President-elect, and to demonstrate his intent on this, his party
conducted a mock swearing-in for him on January 30, 2017. The ceremony was
ritually presided over by Miguna Miguna and MP TJ Kajwang. But that one magic handshake—Kenyans
call it the Famous Handshake—put a stop to all the hostilities. It is said no
one knows what deal the two men had struck inside that office. Whatever it was,
it was the miracle of 2018, good for Kenya and Africa.
Here is the whole
history of those elections:
On August 8, 2017,
the Kenyans conducted the General Election. On August, 2017, Uhuru Kenyatta of
the Jubilee Party was declared winner. Following the declaration, Raila Amolo
Odinga and Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka of the National Super Alliance successfully
challenged the presidential election in Supreme Court of Kenya. On September 1,
2017, the Supreme Court ordered the Independent Electoral and Boundaries
Commission to organise and conduct a fresh presidential election within 60 days
of the determination.
On September 10,
2017, Raila Odinga and Kalonzo Musyoka withdrew from the fresh race, citing
absence of a level playing field for the candidates. The electoral referee went
ahead, conducting the fresh poll, with the name of Odinga on the ballot, on
October 26, 2017. On October 30, 2017, Uhuru was again declared the
President-elect, and with it began the impasse in the country. Raila supporters
conduct a parallel mock swearing-in, and the impasse threaten to mutate into a
crisis until the March 9, 2018 Famous Handshake brought everything to a happy
conclusion. Once again, it remains privileged information what the two parties
had discussed and agreed wherever they were discussing that ended in this great
Kenyan friendship. One thing, though, these are politicians. It is normal for
them and good for us when they shake hands.
Chronic causes of the current post-election impasse in
Malawi
The post-mortem of
the very first multiparty elections of 1994 recommended reforms in that area in
the country. In 2002, the MEC had indicted itself, observing, “In 1999 the
Commission did not perform very well in the management of elections, as
transparency, accountability, trust and efficiency were under question” (MEC
Review of Operational Plan of the Commission 2002 as cited in English, 2004, p.
29). English notes that same sentiments were expressed in the MESN Presidential
and Parliamentary Elections Report 2004 and in the EU EOM Final Statement 2004.
“Generally the
election process was marred with serious irregularities. The components that
were worst affected include voter registration, campaign process and counting
and tabulation of election results,” so declares the MESN Presidential and
Parliamentary Elections Report 2004.
As for the European
Observer Mission, it is almost an indictment. “There were, however, many
problems with the electoral process, some of which were so serious that
confidence in the accuracy of the results was undermined. It is therefore vital
that stakeholders continue developing democratic practice in Malawi,” so reads
the EU EOM Final Statement 2004.
We never took heed,
and two years later, Gloppen et al. (2006, p. 7) was to observe that the quality
of the electoral process in the country had dwindled right from the 1994
democratic elections, sentiments which were to be corroborated a year later, in
August 2007 when the Malawi Law Commission was to recommend comprehensive electoral
reforms in the country. One recommendation was that the President “shall be
elected by a majority of more than fifty percent of valid votes” (The Report of
the Law Commission on the Review of the Constitution, p. 75). To demonstrate
the chronic nature of this problem, the Report was to point out that a similar
recommendation had been made previously, in 1998, by the Special Law Commission
on the Technical Review of the Constitution (p. 75).
Come the chaotic nature of the 2014 electoral process, the civil
society was to be moved to strongly demand a review of the country’s broad
electoral legal framework. It took a coalition of CSOs to form the National
Task Force of Electoral Reforms for the Malawi Law Commission to (re)start the
reviewing of the electoral laws in April 2016 (EU Election Follow-up Mission,
2017, p. 13). It was only after this Commission had made its submissions in
April 2017, that the government was finally dragged towards the electoral
reform stream.
To-date, a number of the six bills on electoral reforms
presented to Parliament have been passed though the ruling party, the
Democratic Progressive Party, aided by some MPs from the opposition, had ensured
that the Constitution (Amendment) Bill requiring a President to be voted with a
majority of more than fifty percent of the valid votes should not.
The gravity of this dereliction of duty by our MPs should be
measured in the light of what the Centre for Multiparty Democracy (2014),
citing Chinsinga (2006), observed, namely that elections constitute the
hallmark of democratic politics or the very heart of democracy (p 17). These
sentiments reflect what Peter Mutharika, now President of the Republic of
Malawi, had observed way back in 1996, as a law expert. At the time, Mutharika
had advised Malawi to consider moving away from the traditional
‘winner-take-all’ voting system also known as majoritarian system. His argument
was that this system denies minority groups of representation (Mutharika, 1996,
p. 220). Now that this man had become President, it was everyone’s expectation
that he would go proactive in changing electoral laws for those arrangements
that would address the concerns he had raised way back in 1996. Two Round
System or 50+1 system could be one way to address the problem. Unfortunately,
when the opportunity came to effect this positive change through a Bill in
Parliament, the MPs rejected it outright.
Commenting on the development, Thindwa (2019), bemoaned that
failure to adopt the 50+1 system as a lost opportunity for Malawi’s democracy
(see ‘Snubbed bill haunts parties’ by Mkandawire, L. on front page, Weekend Nation, Saturday, March 16, 2019).
What all this
entails is that our failure to address with urgency recommendations for
electoral reforms is costing us big time. All sides on the matter are to blame for
this great failure.
So what should we, as a nation, do at this time?
First of all, let us
desist from conceiving the challenges at hand as confined to a single stage in
the many stages of the electoral process. Second, let us remember that public
trust in almost all public institutions and offices, including in politicians
themselves, has been on the decline.
Let us also understand
that the Court approaches the question of determination of electoral results
from the point-of-view of liberal democracy, i.e. whether what had happened had
aligned with the requirements in a liberal democracy as provide our
Constitution and all laws defining and guiding elections in this country. When
your perception is aligned to this view, you are bound to look at the Court’s
single stroke of genius, I mean the determination, as the answer.
The public administrator
knows that, in reality, liberal democracy is a complex system. This means that “if we apply such a multi-faceted
perspective on democratic political systems, democracy cannot be reduced only
to periodical elections of governments on the basis of party competition, as it
is articulated by the concept of liberal democracy” (Scheider & Eberlein,
2015, p. 3).
So, our first job is
to convince ourselves that the determination of the Constitutional Court will
constitute a single stroke of genius to the problem; it will give us direction,
and nothing more. What to do after that direction is given is what should
matter: have we prepared ourselves and our supporters to accept the direction?
If we shut our minds to what this outcome will entail, then we will allow the
challenge at hand to morph into a crisis. That won’t be good for our nation.
This also entails
that we should urge the people to invoke sanity and exercise restraint and
patience as the Court works to determine the outcome. If we begin to make too many
demands and offer ultimatums at this moment, we will complicate the matter even
further. Let us also remember that the world will define us by how well we will
handle ourselves in surmounting this challenge for a better democracy.
Currently, there are
funny exchanges, the opposition lampooning the President-elect, and the
President-elect deriding the opposition. The Opposition have described Mutharika’s
Government as a Tipp-Ex Government, an illegitimate one. The newspapers—not
sure they still teach ethics in these schools of journalism—are fanning this
through media framing. Only yesterday, June 9, on his ‘Thank-you rally’, the
President is said to have chidden the opposition for what they were insinuating
that he only had a few days to enjoy State House, because he would be forced
packing by the poll. He particularly taunted his former Vice, Saulos Chilima,
for saying Mutharika would never rig the elections because, he, Saulosi, was a genius
on matters of computer. He also took aim at the MCP Vice-President, Sidik Mia,
punning on Mia’s names on the meerkat or suricate, a carnivore that looks like
a cat and mostly burrows in hot deserts.
As a citizen,
there’s fun in such comedy, but sometimes, these things flare the angers and
can fan violence. I especially don’t understand why the President, a man already
sworn in, should be discharging live coals for live coals.
What our leaders
should know is that we are reading you, and we are rightly setting our opinion
about you based on your manner of handling this impasse.
Lastly, as a nation,
let us go back and establish where we went wrong. This will help us correct
ourselves and our way of doing things. I admire what Blessings Chinsinga has
said on this.
In an article ‘Time
for a new political project’ (see The
Sunday Times dated Sunday, June 9, 2019, p. 15), Professor Chinsinga has invited
stakeholders to consider this challenge as opportunity for positive change.
“Whenever conflicts (though I do not qualify this impasse as a conflict)
arise,” he observes, “key stakeholders should engage in negotiations that
should lead to some kind of compromise and ultimately to cooperation.” He does
not name the key stakeholders, and he does not explain these negotiations he is
advocating for, but it should be clear to everyone that his position is that
organisations, for example, political parties, constructive CSOs, church bodies
such as the Livingstonia Synod, Nkhoma Synod, Blantyre Synod, and all religious
bodies including the Public Affairs Committee, must invite themselves to a
round table and begin to discuss with patience on how best to resolve this
impasse. When the matter is in Court it does not necessarily mean you should
never meet to strategise on preparing the citizenry of the manner of accepting
the outcome.
Our problem is
coming from a far, and, if considered from a complex perspective, what has
happened isn’t something that has not been happening. It has happened many
times before, and each time it happened, we were warned against letting events
settle themselves. It is now time to engage ourselves in serious reflection to
ensure we seriously begin to reform ourselves (ethical issues) and our systems
(the bureaucracy or the public sector, political parties, et cetera). These
reforms should be far-reaching and robust, aimed at changing systems. We have tried
many a piece-meal reform before, almost all of which very soon fell on their
haunches all because we mistook rebranding for reforms. Rebranding often deals
with external appearance; reforms address root-causes of system sicknesses. Zaire,
after the ruinous reign of Mobutu rebranded to the Democratic Republic of
Congo, but what has changed there in terms of democracy and quality of life? Very
little. Why? Reforms must aim at renewal and overhauling of systems for those systems
more acceptable and more pro-poor. It must go beyond merely changing names or
churning of more ‘documents’.
Serious public
sector reforms today are a must. There are two reasons for this. First,
“citizens’ expectations and demands of governments are growing, not
diminishing: they expect openness, higher levels of service quality delivery, solutions
to more complex problems, and the maintenance of existing social entitlements”
(OECD Modernising Government, 2005, p. 13). In other words, if these issues are
not attended to now, chaos will be inevitable. Such chaos could demonstrate
itself in increasing cases of corruption, rising cases of integrity failures
and neglect. That the polls have been questioned is a demonstration of this
sickness. We must collectively work to ensure smooth elections in future.
Public sector
reforms are also crucial today because quality of democracy itself is in
decline and the people have lost trust in many public institutions and
politicians today. Diamond (2015), writes that,
[A]round 2006, the expansion of freedom and democracy
in the world came to a prolonged halt. Since 2006, there has been no net
expansion in the number of electoral democracies, which has oscillated between
114 and 119 (about 60 percent of the world’s states). . . the number of both
electoral and liberal democracies began to decline after 2006 and then
flattened out. Since 2006, the average level of freedom in the world has also
deteriorated slightly, leveling off at about 3.30 (p. 142).
I appreciate the
fact that some scholars, for example, Levitsky and Way (2015), argue to the
contrary, namely, that “there is little evidence that the democratic sky is
falling or (depending on your choice of fable) that the wolf of authoritarian
resurgence has arrived” (p. 45). For them, “the state of global democracy has
remained stable over the last decade, and it has improved markedly relative to
the 1990s” (p. 45). I do not subscribe to that position for the simple reason
that, almost every Afrobarometer survey conducted both in Malawi and other
African countries for a number of years running shows trust in institutions
that enhance democracy plummeting.
Democracy is built
around the principle of trust. A simple explanation of this is thus: through
the Constitution, in 1994 Malawians (as principals) ‘surrendered’ their
responsibility for running the state in the hands of the state or government
(the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary) as agents. These agents can
only fulfill their duties in trust, and this trust is maintained or sustained through
an open system of conducting business of government. Every five years, the
owners of the authority (the people as principals) go to polls to declare their
verdict over whether the few people or agents they had put their trust in to
run the state, did it to their (the people’s) satisfaction. Such agents are
either voted in again or voted out, depending on their performance.
This is why my
position on reform is that we must start by establishing a robust Open
Government System in Malawi. Chinsinga has suggested that we should start by
giving section 65 of the Constitution a bite. Perhaps his worry is that,
already, the MPs who were elected on independent ticket, are abandoning their
shelter enmasse, promising to work with the ruling party, the DPP, without
seeking authorisation from their principals.
I am not sure that
should be where we should start from. I personally felt that we should start by
creating a body that should oversee all issues of Open Government at a grand
scale. I know that we have the Open Government Unit in the Office of President
and Cabinet, but that unit is hardly known. Thus, although “institutionally,
Malawi has established an OGP Steering Committee, which includes government
departments, members of civil society, and Members of Parliament . . . (and)
with regards to a lead agency, the OGP is placed within the Office of the
President and Cabinet” (Razzano, 2016, p. 19), we still have a lot to do on
this.
In May 2013, Malawi
was among the six African nations at the first ever Open Government Partnership
meeting in Mombasa, Kenya (Ranchod, 2014, p. 1). Malawi, together with South
Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Liberia and Ghana, had just expressed interest to join
Open Government Partnership (Ranchod, p. 1), a peer review mechanism in which a
country subjects itself to international scrutiny on governance issues centring
on five pillars of openness, transparency, accountability, responsiveness, and
citizen participation. According to Piotrowski (2017), Open Government
Partnership also “includes collaboration policies” (p. 155) and as a
multinational initiative, it has become a “major administrative reform” (p.
155).
The initiative was
launched in 2011, and I just don’t know whether Malawi would have been
grappling with issues of corruption if it had implemented a robust Open
Government right from the beginning in 2011.
During his campaign for President, Barack Obama (at the time
a Senator), promised “to restore the American people’s trust in their
government by making government more open and transparent” (Yu & Robinson,
2012, p. 193 citing Agenda: Ethics, CHANGE.GOV). Yu and Robinson observe that on
president Obama’s first day in office, he issued two memoranda that dealt with
open government for increased transparency and technological innovation. The
first, a memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act, was designed to
encourage agencies to be more responsible to Freedom of Information Act, FOIA,
requests. The second memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, took a
much broader view. Whereas the FOIA memorandum suggested that a “new era of
open government” could be achieved through the transparency that the FOIA
compliance entails, the Open Government memorandum treated transparency as just
one among a trio of goals—transparent, participatory, and collaborative.
Why America, a nation we believe to be a leader in democracy
would crave more openness, et cetera, should teach us that there is something democracy
can gain if it is run on the wheels of Open Government principles.
A robust Open Government system would oversee issues of
access to information, accessibility of declared assets of public officials,
institutional integrity, et cetera. For me, this could be the best starting
point.
Next, I would
suggest exhuming the Senate from the ruins of old graves of greed.
Before 2001, the Malawian Constitution had provisions for
the Senate. It is important to note that the framers of the Constitution, for
whatever reason, had postponed the establishment of the Senate until May 1999,
i.e. after the 1999 Elections.
In 2000, a Bill to abolish the Senate was defeated. Intent
to do away with the Senate, Government tabled it again in 2001. The Malawi
Human Rights Commission and the Malawi Human Rights Resource Centre sought the
intervention of the High Court to prevent the Bill from being tabled. But while
the Court was still deliberating the matter, ruling party (UDF) MPs plus a
faction of MPs from the opposition Malawi Congress Party passed it within a
week of deliberation (Patel, 2008, p. 25).
By doing away with the Senate, the MPs had deprived
democracy of the role the Senate was to play. Among other functions, the
Constitution had given the Senate “the power to initiate legislation, to vote
motions, (and) to confirm or remit Bills passed by the National Assembly”
(Malawi Law Commission, 2007, p. 45).
In the words of Kachale (2012), the abolition of the Senate
represents “a departure from the terms of the original contract (set out in the
Constitution)” (p. 32). Kachale adds that, since the Senate was largely under
the aegis of Local Government, its death represented a premonition of worse
things to come in Local Government. He, thus, concludes that the reason the
local government elections were postponed from 2005 can directly be attributed
to this repeal (p. 33). These sentiments are corroborated by African Institute
of Corporate Citizenship, Malawi Economic Justice Network, & Transparency
International, (2013, p. 21) who bemoan the move for exacerbating the
representational gap between Parliament and the people.
The MPs had argued that the Senate had to go because it
would be too expensive to run (Patel & Tostensen, 2007, p. 86). However,
Brown (2000) argues that the Senate suffered this fate because the then ruling
United Democratic Front feared that “it would not command a majority in that
Senate, thereby reducing the ruling party’s power” (p. 22). Brown’s arguments
make sense considering the fact that the Senate had been given the powers to
initiate impeachment against a President.
The importance of the Senate should also be read from its
composition. What Chigawa (2008), writes on this is instructive:
The existence
of a second chamber of parliament will enhance business efficiency in the
legislature. Whatever business is left undone or unfinished in the lower
chamber will be attended to in the upper chamber. Secondly, the second chamber
will provide a forum for the representation of special interest groups such as
the disabled and women (and technocrats). Thirdly, the inclusion of chiefs in
the Senate will ensure that traditional authorities are given a real opportunity
to take part in matters of national importance. The relevance and value of
these considerations could not be ignored by the (Law) Commissioners. It was
fairly certain that a substantial number of people in the country wanted a
second chamber for reasons that are beneficial to the nation. It is for this
reason that the majority of Commissioners reached the conclusion that the
Senate must be re-introduced as a second chamber of parliament in Malawi (p.
4).
The Senate was to be “a body of 80 members representing each
district and elected by the district councils; a chief from every district
being elected by a caucus of chiefs; and 32 senators to be elected by a
two-thirds majority of sitting members of the Senate based on nominations from
interest groups, including representatives from women’s organisations, people
with disabilities, the trade unions and the business, education and farming
sectors” (Patel, Tambulasi, Molande & Mpesi, 2007, p. 31).
It is clear that the Senate would also enhance patriotism
since “persons elected would have been recognised for their outstanding
services to the public or making a major contribution to the social, cultural
or technological development of the nation, and representative of the major
faith communities in Malawi” (Patel, et al, 2007, p. 31).
The Senate would thus bring balance and expertise to
Parliament. It would also indirectly deal with the problem of section 65. In
other words, voices representing interest groups, culture, know-how and
provinces would be very much alive in all matters of public interest. Such a
body is necessary or we will keep overwhelming the Public Affairs Committee on
matters that would very easily gain national consensus through representation
in the Second Chamber.
CONCLUSION
The impasse before
us is an opportunity for us to mend our ways in the manner we conduct both
government and political business. These challenges should spur us to demand
correction of many ills using formal democratic forums. For this to work, the
situation calls for sanity, and sanity requires patience, wisdom and
understanding. Taking to the streets could never be wisdom at this moment. To
borrow from The Nation (dated Monday,
June 10, 2019) in their editorial, “Despite the fact that the Constitution
gives Malawians rights, including freedoms of assembly and expression, we find,
like we have stated before, the conduct of taking to the streets to protest the
results when there is a court case pending, to be premature.” Let us remember
that it is our duty to ensure these challenges do not escalate into a crisis.
Lastly, as we await the determination of the Court, let us not forget that what
builds us is far much bigger than what divides us—we have a nation to run and a
future to protect. Our kids should never wake up some day and ask why we had
failed to use commonsense to discipline ourselves for their sake. The Court outcome
can come our way or their way, but what will define us is how manly or womanly
we shall conduct ourselves following that determination.
Above all else, let
us keep praying for our peace and all the leaders—whichever side. Let us also
keep thanking GOD for giving us Malawi, a land sweater than all lands of the
world put together.
I love my country.
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