Also has altered the national flag (because the rising sun emblem on the existing flags does not truly reflect the “development transformation” achieved by the Mutharika administration); five, brand-new, universities (including one in the President’s rural home township) and a £70 million Lilongwe hotel-complex which is to include a 130-bedroom five star hotel with ten V.V.I.P suites and twenty presidential villas, a 1500-person conference centre, and a banqueting hall.

A Big Man would not be big without some prestige, visionary, projects of this sort. Nor would he be a Big Man without one or two family palaces to add to his four official ones, several Mercedes limousines, a private jet and a huge retinue of dependants.

If it’s good enough for the president of a mere bank, it must surely be good enough for the president of a sovereign state like Malawi, especially one which, for this year at least, holds the chairmanship of the African Union. The middlemen of aid, dubbed by Hancock “Lords of Poverty”, must show some solidarity with each other.

Presidents of Malawi will treat any suggestion of their own corrupt practices and extravagance with genuine indignation and fury. “Do you expect a President of Malawi to go to work on a bicycle?”. This question, which might once have been treated seriously by a Julius Nyerere, in neighbouring Tanzania, must now be treated as entirely rhetorical in the whole of southern Africa.

It is very likely that this multi-million pound official aid to Malawi, channelled through the British Department for International Development in Lilongwe; through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund in New York, the European Commission in Brussels, the African Development Bank in Abidjan, and through their permanent staffs in Lilongwe, and through a dozen western embassies, may itself soon be dwarfed by a new flood of soft loans to the Malawi government from the Chinese government’s Export and Import Bank.

The unofficial, private, aid-flows to Malawi which are channelled through the uncounted Non-Government Organisations, international charities and private benefactors operating in Malawi, should not be discounted. That unofficial flow is completely unquantified and unregulated, but it does mean that, cumulatively, the aid industry must be worth more than one billion pounds to Malawi, every year: one thousand million pounds to one of the smallest and most delightfully insignificant countries on the planet.

To put this aid into some sort of scale: Malawi’s own government budget this year, the largest ever, and one which actually includes a large portion of this official aid, is a shade under 300 billion Malawi kwacha, or 1.34 billion pounds. Malawi’s overwhelmingly predominant export, burley tobacco, brings in, at best, about £311 million per year.

Very few countries in the world, certainly not Britain or the USA, can boast that they balance their payments so exactly: one billion pounds out in government spending, and one billion pounds in, in aid, year by year. Perhaps it is the very nature of aid that it MUST balance government expenditure. If it does not achieve that balance immediately, it will become a loan with no expectation of repayment. A loan of that sort is aid.

An industry (in this case the whole aid industry in Malawi), with a billion pound annual turnover is a big business in any part of the world but in a sub-Saharan nation of 13.6 million souls like Malawi, half of whom are earning less than the equivalent of eighty pence per day, the aid business is a very major player indeed.

The fact that British taxpayers barely notice the £4,000 million in bilateral aid, and the £3,000 million in multilateral aid which flows every year from them to the rest of the world through DFID, shouldn’t allow them to treat it as a small business. Even the British High Commissioner to Malawi, Fergus Cochrane-Dyet, seemed mildly surprised in a letter to the Malawi Daily Times on 9th July 2010:

“The UK government has announced that the commitment to increase spending on international development to 0.7% of UK GDP will become law. What this means is that, despite cuts in other areas of public expenditure to tackle the fiscal deficit, overall UK spending on International Development through the Department for International Development (DFID), currently running at over a massive £8 billion per year, will go up and up”.

In which case, and given that this player has been here in Malawi, in some form or other, ever since Independence, half a century ago, the question of how many “development goals” this major player has scored in that time may legitimately be asked.

Why are over six million Malawians still living in “abject poverty”? If such a question cannot be asked of the generality of foreign aid to Malawi, might it be asked merely of British aid to Malawi, or, by extension, of British official aid to Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo, each of which for years has been receiving more aid from Britain than Malawi?

The question may be asked, but it cannot easily be answered in a short article like this one, though it can be fairly asserted that the average, small-farmer in Malawi is materially no better-off than he was at Independence and that the arable land and fresh water that provides his subsistence has significantly diminished and deteriorated since that time.

From this we may be irresistably drawn to Natus’ and Fayaz’ conclusion that these billions of foreign aid must have benefited people other than the ordinary Malawians for whom they were intended. If you are a rich man in Malawi it is likely that you are associated, in some way, with Malawi’s only really big business: the aid business.

A sophisticated explanation for the continuing poverty, might include an acknowledgement of the effects of Malawi’s spectacular, 3% per annum, population growth and an answer to the question “What would Malawi be like today if it had NOT received all these billions in aid money?” A perfectly legitimate and relevant question. Would the ten million additional population since Independence have caused and itself been the victim of a major humanitarian catastrophe if the aid money had not cushioned them against its effects?

Explanations of Malawi’s continuing poverty abound, but many people in Malawi still favour the most obvious explanation: that people other than the intended beneficiaries were the only ones who gained from the vast aid-flow.

The feeling is quite widespread that the “middlemen” of aid: the foreign aid-workers in Malawi; the local staff of NGOs, the bankers and bureaucrats, and (especially) the Malawian politicians and public servants, who stand between the western taxpayer-donors and the poor farmers of Malawi, are not being held properly accountable for the continuing poverty, or indeed for the middlemen’s own wealth.

The middlemen are seen not to have done badly for themselves during this period . Robert Zoellick, the World Bank president, when he visits Malawi later this year, will certainly not step out, blinkingly, into the Malawian sun, from a crowded minibus. “Do you expect me to use a bicycle?” he may rhetorically ask, after popping another US$54 million of his annual contribution into the Malawian government’s, general spending, “Consolidated Fund”, and a similar amount into an International Development Association “soft” loan to Malawi.

The latest of the World Bank lending and grants to Malawi, which by 2010 totalled $2.6 billion. The World Bank’s latest (4th) Country Assistance Strategy for Malawi envisaged $392 mn in grants for Irrigation, Rural Livelihoods, Water, and Business Environment Strengthening projects, but it was finding difficulty in July 2010 in getting Malawi to absorb over $200 mn of this sum on such assigned projects.

The Malawi government’s “Consolidated Fund” is much more absorbent. The rags-to-riches stories which feature Malawi’s politicians are the source of countless bitter jokes there: how Presidents of the Republic, ministers of key government ministries and their top officials, Members of Parliament, especially those belonging to the ruling party of the day, are specialists in their own “poverty-alleviation strategies” and “development”. The middlemen of aid always appear to do alright.

The billion-pound annual flood of aid money through Malawi is shepherded by a host of officials and accountants who attend to its paperwork. Although for the most part properly audited, it is “free” money in the sense that no-one accepts final responsibility for it. It is quintessentially “other people’s” money in a way that private income or public monies are not.

In a patriarchal state like Malawi, this “other- people’s” money finds its way naturally into the hands of powerful individuals and their clientage, and although very few of them would, fiendishly, want it NOT to do some good in the Malawian community, everyone associated with it understands that it doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t.

The middlemen of aid who shepherded it into a thousand, rather leaky but clearly-labelled Malawian pots, will simply move onto other things: possibly a little chastened by their failures but certainly not out-of-pocket, or out of a job, because of them. They will have fine careers or pensions to look forward to. They “did their best in difficult circumstances”. The finest of them may have replaced or repaired some of those pots. A few just helped themselves.

As for the aid-givers in Britain and in the rest of the “developed” world, they’ve probably forgotten all about it and are looking for something new: something as morally “good” as Malawi has always been, but ideally with a less prickly and venal political establishment.

The poor maize-grower in the remote Malawian village and the dawn charcoal-seller, with over-laden bicycle on the road to Blantyre, having hardly even noticed the middleman’s existence through the dust of his speeding 4×4, continue to do what they’ve always done.

They did not notice the seven members of the African Development Bank team, led by Peter Simon, whose five-day visit to Malawi concluded in June 2010 with the cheerful statement that they were “highly impressed with the country’s progress in reform and macro-economic stability”.

Nor will this “average Joe” catch more than a glimpse of Zoellick’s World Bank entourage in December this year as they speed past him, rehearsing the same macroeconomic mantras behind their electric car windows.

The other Lords of Poverty, the Malawian politicians who passed briefly during the 2009 election campaign and who won’t be seen in the villages until the next General Election, at least spoke to them in Chichewa, cracked jokes, dished out money in piles of 50-kwacha notes, and didn’t bother their audiences with macroeconomic statistics.

They have learned to speak the language of the World Bank when they are facing in that direction, but without entirely forgetting their own native languages for the rare occasions when they have to face the other way, towards their own electors.

In Whitehall and Westminster, in London, the economic statistics of DFID will probably win the argument about the benefits of British aid in Malawi: how it has lifted a million out of poverty and how it should continue at an ever-faster rate.

In Lilongwe, the Malawian capital, the message is very similar — but with one important difference. The permanent secretary at the Malawian Ministry of Industry and Trade, announcing in June 2010 that poverty in Malawi had been reduced “by one-third since 2003″, diverges from DFID only in attributing the change to Malawian government policies, without a single mention of DFID, USAID, EU, ADB, WB, UNDP, UNESCO and the others.

At least they agree, against the evidence of their own eyes (and of the more independent assessments of the Washington-based Fund for Peace which, in 2010, places Malawi among the 37 “Failed States” of the World), that Malawian poverty is disappearing fast. The statistics of the IMF, the Overseas Development Institute, the UN Millenium Campaign and DFID are warmly welcomed as if they were produced by neutral expert-observers rather than, as they really are, by lords of poverty with a strong vested interest in their positive message.

Statistics that include millions and billions come easily in Lilongwe and London where few pause to count the zeros or to check how much double-counting is going on. Who cares, as long as the money keeps coming in? There will be many individual success-stories to give flesh to their reports: of irrigation projects and hybrid seeds and grateful smallholders.

In the rest of Malawi, however, and outside the ranks of the middlemen and their immediate clients: amongst the “average Joes”, I have a suspicion that General Natus, and Fayaz, will still have the last words.

Part 1 o this article can be read on this link: http://www.nyasatimes.com/columns/lords-of-poverty-in-malawi-part-1.html

Cynics will greet such a statement with a knowing smile of familiarity and a nod of the head. An interesting example of this feature can be culled, almost at random, from the Malawi “Daily Times” of 2 June 2010 in which the Malawian branch of the British Department for International Development (DFID) praises itself for lifting one million Malawians “out of abject poverty”.

In the attached Comments column, however, someone using the pseudonym “General Natus” wonders “how we make billionaire presidents while the country goes further down” and one who calls himself “Fayaz” writes exuberantly “Hahaha what a joke! How much is it? I have seen these figures get bigger and bigger and the most important thing [is] the Malawian average ‘joe’ gets poorer and poorer!”

DFID is a middleman of aid and one of the greatest of the Lords of Poverty in Malawi. So is the President of Malawi.

Although “General Natus” and “Fayaz” may not be armed with DFID’s battery of statistics, all parties to this discussion would agree that the Malawian presidency is a quick route to billionaire status, and has been so for all three of its post-Independence incumbents: Hastings Banda, Bakili Muluzi and now Bingu wa Mutharika whose private palace in Thyolo is now nearing completion as memories of his own shaky taxi business on the Lilongwe-Likuni road fade into the past. Nor does anyone deny that nearly half of today’s Malawians (though clearly not these ones) live below the official poverty-line. Malawian presidents, like DFID, are middlemen of aid in this country.

They are very rich people presiding over very poor people.

Although Natus and Fayaz may not agree with this conclusion, the phenomenon of the politically powerful getting richer, and the poor, poorer, is not linked in any straightforward way, to the corruption of these middlemen. As a rule, middlemen of aid are hardworking people with a strong sense of their own responsibility; their sense of lordship is not without a corresponding sense of obligation.

The phenomenon may have much more to do with the nature of the aid itself, and of the Malawian state, which, despite the trappings of a hybrid Western democracy, is essentially a patriarchy under a father-figure autocrat. Malawi ceased to be a colony of Britain nearly half a century ago so the middlemen of Malawi’s overwhelmingly biggest industry, the aid industry, inevitably and naturally found themselves to be its heirs.

Let us return later to the more complex issue of the nature of development aid. The Malawian state has fewer veils to conceal its true identity and will be discussed first.

A recent “Open Letter” to the President written by Jimmy Koreia-Banda, on 3 June 2010, gives the flavour of the Malawian polity. It is in the form of an open letter because Koreia-Banda belongs to a well-known class of Malawian businessmen-politicians who find themselves too remote from the presidential centre of power for the health of their own businesses and of their own political ambitions.

They must, from time to time, realign themselves with the man at the top. Koreia-Banda writes with admirable clarity: “When the President speaks, that is policy. It is now up to the relevant authorities to make sure that policy is implemented”.

The Hastings Banda dictatorship is now, as this quotation illustrates, a widely-recognised model for the modern Malawian state: a patriarchy with enough of the trappings of a democratic state to satisfy anxious donors.

The first president’s new statue and mausoleum stand proudly next to the new, Chinese-built, parliament house in Lilongwe where a feeble Opposition surrenders lengthily and noisily — or (as at present), quietly and quickly — to an all-powerful presidency.

The current president has started to claim some of Hastings Banda’s traditional leadership-titles, such as the “Ngwazi”. Not far away from that legislative centre in Lilongwe is the huge presidential palace, the executive centre built by Banda in the 1980s with typical totalitarian grandiosity.

There is also the High Court whose careful judicial decisions are forever being overturned (or delayed into extinction) by costly government appeals and unexplained presidential pardons. The court is far enough away, in Blantyre, from the government village in Lilongwe to avoid the worst of the political heat, but on neighbouring Capital Hill in Lilongwe are the government ministries. Each has a deeply insecure minister in charge of it, hoping to postpone for another month or two the inevitable moment when he will have to remind the president of his own existence by “open letter”.

Malawi’s small business community may attempt to detach itself from politics but its local leadership knows full well that the continued viability of their businesses depends almost entirely on political favour from the top. The most adventurous of them form political parties in the hope that they may find themselves with something to sell in Parliament to the ruling party.

The less adventurous contribute to the president’s Democratic Progressive Party and the president’s charities and those of his wife. They congratulate him, formulaicly, in newspaper advertisements on every possible occasion, and otherwise keep their heads well down. The expatriate staff of multinational companies are acutely aware that their own temporary residency permits are fully dependent, one year after the next, on political favour. They are very determined not to rock the boat unless — as was the case in 2009, of Cargill Cotton — they are able to contemplate a future for their business outside Malawi. The President’s Malawian children remain in neat lines.

The aid donors are not as immune to these insecurities as they may pretend, and they circle the presidency in much the same anxiously gossipy way as the ministers, speculating on who is “in” and who is “out” with the Ngwazi sun-king. Their personal escape routes are more assured than those of government ministers, but their local influence, their access to the presidential palace of New State House, is equally precarious.

It is widely speculated that Malawi’s main bilateral donor, the United Kingdom, has, for most of Mutharika’s reign, had no direct access to the president at all and has to peer for the Ngwazi over the shoulders of the much more favoured Chinese, and Zimbabwean, ambassadors.

They are fully aware that they are Lords of Poverty only so long as the other Lords of Poverty in Malawi, the president and his men, allow them to dispose, on poor people, of their mounting piles of aid money. Without that aid flow, the large British High Commission in Malawi would be reduced to the size of a humble consular office. That is all that would then be needed.

Graham Hancock, back in 1989, was in no doubt about aid. “Aid is not bad … because it is sometimes misused, corrupt or crass: rather it is inherently bad, bad to the bone….As a welfare dole to buy the repulsive loyalty of whining, idle and malevolent governments … it is possibly the most formidable obstacle to the productive endeavours of the poor” and it was he who named the middlemen of aid “Lords of Poverty” in a book of the same name. It is clear that

The High Commissioner, Fergus Cochrane-Dyet

Hancock has won the argument only on the chattering periphery of the aid industry: certainly not at its heart. The middlemen of aid are still persuading debt-ridden governments and voters in the West to “ring- fence” — even to increase — their vast aid-spending budgets in Africa. People who work in the aid industry, both in Malawi and in Britain, are often considered to be “virtuous” in a way that PhD holders are often considered to be “clever”. Aid-spending in Africa is considered to be virtuous, per se, without need of further justification, and aid to Malawi is considered particularly virtuous because that country –despite all the aid — is still so very poor. The alarm-signals about this continuing poverty are rarely heard.

As for the aid itself, it may best be understood as belonging to two categories: official, government-to-government aid; distinct from unofficial, private, aid.

The first comes from Western taxpayers through their governments’ overseas development budgets and is channelled into projects: either directly, through donor government departments such as the British Department for International Development in Malawi (bilateral aid), or indirectly through the European Union, the African Development Bank, the World Bank, and the host of United Nations organisations which specialise in issues such as HIV/AIDS, Education, Population, Industrial Development, Women, Children, Drugs-Purchasing, and the like; all working, as best they can, with the Malawian government ministries. That is called multilateral aid because it arrives from more than one donor.

Thus, official aid finds its way to Malawi in two ways: the bilateral path and the multilateral path.

Unofficial aid, on the other hand, comes through private charities that can range in size from giants like Madonna and Oxfam to the Calvary Sewing Circle of Love in Connecticut, USA which makes children’s clothes for Malawi. Much of the in-country project work, official as well as unofficial, multilateral, bilateral and private, is done by locally-recruited Non-Government Organisations (NGOs).

All of these organisations have to dispose of large sums of foreign aid money in the very short time-frames imposed by their annual audits. All of their local directors, expatriate and Malawian, are minor Lords of Poverty, equipped at least with those basic symbols of lordship which in Malawi must include a large car, a team of servants, and a nice house in the capital city sheltering behind a very high wall, topped by glittering razor wire.

To obtain an audience with one of these Lords, a poorly-paid, and desperately sleepy, guard must first be roused by a peremptory hoot of the car-horn at the gate.

Let us look again at the tiny example of British aid to Malawi. The people who are stirred into aid-giving by stories of poverty in Malawi tend to be the kinder sort of taxpayers and private individuals.

The fact that they are rich by the standards of Malawi means that, for a relatively small donation (a paltry 0.7% of GDP is the current British target for foreign aid; a few regular pounds for Oxfam or an orphanage, for individuals) some remarkable effects may be anticipated in Malawi’s rural communities where average daily earnings (if one can speak in such terms of mainly subsistence farmers) are in pennies rather than pounds.

One pound Sterling — however despised it may be by international currency speculators in Frankfurt and London — still goes a very long way in Malawi.

The fact that donor countries such as Britain tend to be democracies means that they are responsive, at home, to pressure from their own pop-stars, media proprietors and journalists who shape domestic public opinion and who are thought (at least by politicians) to reflect it, as well.

Western democracies are inclined to give aid to fellow-democracies, especially ones like Malawi that appear to be modelled on themselves. The fact that Malawi’s political leaders are working within another, much more firmly-rooted, and utterly contradictory, tradition of Big Men-and-their-clients (“neo-patrimonialism”) is never allowed to sully their democratic credentials.

Frequent “corruption” scandals are considered by Britain and other western donors as aberrations rather than systemic: mere misunderstandings of the system. The contrary is the truth. The Malawian Big Men and their retainers, legitimated as they are by five-yearly elections (but not at all by their secretive party selection-processes), get the official aid-money to distribute on their pet projects.

In Britain’s case this official, government-to-government, aid to Malawi amounts to nearly £150 million per year: Britain’s contribution to a total of £370 million official aid to Malawi. For Britain this is part of a much more massive, one-and-a-half trillion-pound (£1,500 million) British aid-budget to sub-Saharan Africa and to a four-and-a half trillion pound annual aid budget.

Note: Part 2 of this article will appear in the Thursday edition of the Nyasa Times Online.

Mpinganjira said there are areas President Mutharika is doing well but observed that there are also areas of great concern such as the loan to Zimbabwe.

“How he [Mutharika] lends US$100 million to Zimbabwe, but surely this is the country that doesn’t have that cash,” said BJ.

“When we receive monies from the IMF, from World Bank, it is usually in the range of US$20 million, US$26 million and we all go to town every paper, every radio carries that and here we are, we are getting US$26 million from IMF and we in turn are lending US$100 million to Zimbabwe,” said Mpinganjira on Capital Radio.

“Surely that’s to say the least, that misconception. That is wrong. It should not have happened,” he said.

The money was lent to Zimbabwe in June 2007 loan via the Reserve Bank of Malawi to enable the Zimbabwean government to buy maize in Malawi.

The loan, guaranteed by the Malawi government on the basis of a personal understanding between President Mutharika and his close political pal President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, is due for repayment at the end of December.

General Manager of the Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) Wilson Banda told a news conference that Zimbabwe government is failing to pay back the loan.

Mpinganjira also rebutted allegations that he influenced Mozambique to pull out of a project to establish a shipping route from landlocked Malawi to the Indian Ocean, along the Shire and Zambezi rivers.

“That’s shear madness. I don’t believe that there are too many people who share that madness,” said Mpinganjira after reports indicated that President Mutharika named him during a DPP caucus to have played a role in Mozambique’s withdraw from the project.

However, Mpinganjira said the dream project is good but not necessarily for Malawi now.

“I admit it is a very good project for Malawi but I have said all the time that the sheer size of it, the sheer economics of it, the amount of money to be spent on it probably this is not the right time for that.

“Probably we need to spend that money on other areas of development and probably 10 to 15 years from now that will be a viable project,” he said.

Added the former minister: “As of now, I have never believed that we should be spending that much money when we don’t have schools, when we don’t have hospitals.  I think that sort of money would be better spent here on other development projects.”

Mpinganjira maintained that he has not been in contact with Mozambique President Armando Gebuza and that he has no personal connections.

Yesterday  (8th Sepetember, 2009) I ordered the deportation from our country of four foreign tobacco buyers namely Mr. Kelvin Stainton and Mr. Van de Merwe of Limbe Leaf Tobacco Company, Mr. Collin Armstrong of Alliance One and Mr. Alex Mackay of Premium TAMA.

These individuals connived to deliberately frustrate the policy of this government to improve the welfare of our people through better prices of tobacco.

For a long time they have continued to exploit the poor people of Malawi by offering them much lower prices than those offered in neighbouring countries.

In doing so, they have been sabotaging the Malawi economy and have been harming the very people who grow tobacco for them to buy.

My Fellow Malawians, you will recall that at the beginning of the tobacco marketing season for 2009 the government had entered into an agreement with tobacco companies in Malawi that burley tobacco will not be sold at prices lower than US$2.50 per kilogramme.

Similarly, it had been agreed that flue cured tobacco would be sold at not less than US$3.09 per kilogramme.

These prices had not been fixed arbitrarily. Let me repeat. These prices were not fixed arbitrarily but through negotiations taking into account the cost of inputs and other considerations.

You will also recall that the government of Malawi has declared tobacco to be a crop of national importance to our economy. Therefore anyone sabotaging our economy is an enemy of the people of Malawi.

 Anyone sabotaging our economy is an enemy of the people of Malawi and does not deserve to be in this country.

But to the dismay of the small and poor black tobacco growers, these people have chosen to undermine government by continuing to deliberately depress the prices of tobacco. They have also decided to make fun of me as your leader.

As if this not enough harm they have during this season consistently rejected the good quality tobacco and instead had opted to buy poor quality tobacco with the aim to create a pretext for them to continue to depress tobacco prices so as to make huge profits at the expense of the poor. This is contrary to their previous demand for improved quality of tobacco.

The low prices of our tobacco offered this year are totally unacceptable. In fact this is an act of hostility to our country, to the country that offered them the hospitality and the opportunity to do their business here.

I am now warning all tobacco buyers that any company that deliberately seeks to cheat the people of Malawi and ignore the agreed prices of tobacco and any similar commodity will be dealt with accordingly.

I appeal to all government departments, the immigration, the police and the general public to cooperate with government to protect the poor black Malawi farmer from this unbridled exploitation.

Similarly, I appeal to the judiciary to support government in its efforts to protect our people from continued exploitation.

God Bless our Motherland.

All of us are fed up.

It’s not just Chris Daza, Ishmael Chafukila, Humphrey Mvula, Mayi Hilda Manjankhosi and our fellow Nyasa Times columnist, Nyakuchenya Ganda, (we know even without asking him).It’s the entire coalition team-Malawi Congress Party (MCP) and the United Democratic Front (UDF). All peace loving Malawians are sick to death of these ‘satanic’ speeches.

Ok, there are a few diehards, like the architects of the same, whose own fate is tied to the system.

And then, there are those who get rewarded out of it, they think its fun and people love it.

People sneered at Tom Likambale’s recent article, claiming that stories of Bingu wa mutharika and Comesa were all about the past.

So, what is new about Bakili Muluzi’s 2004 speeches on John Tembo?

POLITICAL PROPAGANDA

Instead of telling people facts that will sell their idols politically, producers of these speeches are wasting time searching from the annals what Muluzi said against Tembo years ago and rerunning the vocalizations now, all with the sole aim of political propaganda.

Cheap propaganda indeed.

CAMPAIGN

To be guileless with our brothers and sisters who earn a living from producing the satanic speeches, they are only bringing our country into disarray.

These speeches will only fuel antagonism amongst Malawians.

Why not talk about projects that the government intend to do?

Why not talk about new appointments that may accommodate Northerners as they have been wholly sidelined for the past five years with only four mnisters in 45 member cabinet and as well the centre with only two ministers?

Why not critique the MCP manifesto?

As opposed to telling the voting public that Muluzi voiced out that Tembo has blood in his hands.

Is it not Bingu who in 2004 praised Muluzi to the skies that he was the champion of democracy? And today he calls him a failure.

Such is politics.

Good politicians

Everyday lost in listening to these satanic speeches will cost us dearly in the long run.

Yet our politicians are criminally wasting time and money on these speeches from the library to distract voters from Muluzi and Tembo. No! That is not the way.

Good politicians bring developmental issues to voters.

Education, health, road networks, issues surrounding the social/economic life of people and many more are the kind of things the nation wants to listen to.

These are the critical issues facing Malawi today. And tomorrow and for decades to come.

Certainly, we are more interested to hear about what tough decisions will be taken to cut our ballooning state debt than Muluzi calling Bingu an ‘economic engineer’.

Amangwetu, this is 2009. What will voters, some of whom never saw late Aaron Gadama, benefit from these speeches from the archives?

Politicians only use these great sons of Malawi (whose death remains a mystery to date) during campaign, yet there is completely nothing in their honour in form of roads and buildings (in their names).

At this highly sensitive period in Malawi, the government is rudderless and adrift, utterly lacking in the authority to stop this nonsense and lead by example.

If need be comment:sembegondwe@yahoo.com