Bingu Wa Mutharika Research Articles

Kamuzu Banda’s memory and negotiation of power in Malawi

This article explores how the competing narratives about Kamuzu Banda’s memory took place between 1964 and 2009 in Malawi, a period during which monuments and commemorative public holidays became the sites on which Kamuzu Banda’s memory was either reconstructed and inscribed or contested as national heritage and identity to yield legitimacy in a political struggle of negotiation of power. Drawing on archival and documentary sources, interviews and critical analysis of monuments, statues and public commemorations associated with Banda the article contends that although there were remarkable changes in reconstruction, re-interpretation and re/appropriation of Kamuzu Banda’s memory as national heritage, the utility, function and instrumentalisation of his memory remained the same for each government. Thus, just like in the autocratic government of Kamuzu Banda the re-interpretation of his memory during the democratic government of Bakili Muluzi and the re-inscription of his memory by his successor Bingu Wa Mutharika served the same particular political interests of legitimizing and supporting the government in power even though the rhetoric was made to sound and appear as serving the ideals of democracy in Malawi. Ultimately, the article shows that Banda’s memory became a site for the negotiation of power. The article contributes to our understanding of how public memory is mobilized by political elites to support and legitimize a government in power. It also points to the fact that meanings of heritage change with changing political situations.

International donors, domestic politics, and the expansion of social cash transfers in Malawi

SummaryMotivationInternational donors piloted social cash transfers in Africa in the 2000s. Successful pilots need to be expanded, to be nationally owned, and to be funded by regular budgets. How this may be done depends on domestic politics, which vary by country. Donors need to engage with local politics if they wish their pilots to be institutionalized. Malawi is one such case, where a change of president opened a window for policy reforms.PurposeWhy were donors, over six years, unable to persuade Bingu wa Mutharika's government of Malawi to adopt social cash transfers; but succeeded with Joyce Banda's administration within two months of her being in office?Methods and approachI adopt John Kingdon's multiple streams framework, originally developed in 1984 to explain how agenda are set in the USA. He observed separate streams of problems, potential policy responses, and politics which may converge at critical junctures—policy windows—when new policies may be adopted. I interviewed 25 policy‐makers in Malawi, including political leaders, donor staff, government civil servants, and civil society officers to trace policy‐making for social cash transfers.FindingsMalawi can be seen to have a super‐presidential system, in which presidents and their closest allies overwhelmingly set the agenda, aligned to their ideological views and political interests. When presidents change, a policy window opens. Mutharika prioritized increasing the maize harvest and stabilizing the economy. The input subsidies used to achieve the former, he saw as “home‐grown” solutions, were preferred to donor orthodoxies. Social protection was for him another donor orthodoxy. It did not align with his beliefs and conflicted with his interests in food security. When Mutharika died suddenly in 2012, Vice‐President Banda took over. Her experience was different to that of her predecessor: she had worked with civil society, was acutely aware of poverty, and had good relations with external non‐governmental organizations and donors. She saw priorities in rising vulnerability and exclusion, she favoured safety nets, and was anxious to gain support for her administration. Social protection came rapidly into favour, pilots were expanded into a national programme.Policy implicationsPolitical leaders support programmes that benefit both development and political survival. Understanding how a brief policy window opened in 2006 (for a draft social support policy) before a larger window opened in 2012, shows both inflection points happened when donor framing on social protection aligned with the ideas and interests of ruling elites. Three useful lessons emerge for donors promoting social protection. First, alignment of ideas and interests matter more than persuasion. Second, framing of social protection should consider domestic politics—in this case the political utility of cash transfers compared to farm subsidies. Third, the interplay of ideas and interests matters—in this case an incoming president faced by an economic crisis while trying to consolidate power saw social protection as a way to alleviate the crisis and build support. Kingdon's framework serves well to analyse this case, but not entirely. It focuses on the ideas and interests of the elites, and may ignore changing ideas among citizens in which Malawi's elites maintained the farm subsidies while citizens grew increasingly sceptical of their value.

A Study of Metaphors used for Bingu wa Mutharika and Peter Mutharika as Presidents of Malawi and the Impact on their Political Legacy

Metaphor analysis has been a very attractive area of scholarly research within cognitive linguistics in which different abstract ideas get mapped into tangible concepts. In Africa, it has become common that individuals like presidents are given metaphors to conceptualise their performance in office with the objective world. However, such political metaphors have not received much attention in academic discourse, and research studies that address the impact of metaphors on presidents’ political legacy are rare. Therefore, this paper analyses metaphors that Malawians have used in relation to their political leaders by drawing examples from two State Presidents: Bingu wa Mutharika and Arthur Peter Mutharika, and how the legacy of the two eventually has come to be associated with the metaphors. In politics, metaphors are essential because they are the lens through which people view and assess their leaders at both theoretical and functional level. Using the approach outlined by Schmitt (2005), the study analyses four major metaphors, namely: MOSE WA LERO (The New Moses), NGWAZI (The Conqueror/The Great Warrior), CHITSULO CHA NJANJI (The Railway Steel), and ADADI (The father/Dad). This paper argues that political metaphors, whether for praise or self-glorification, have an impact on influencing, shaping, and preserving the image of political leaders during their tenure of office which eventually become their legacy. The study acknowledges that presidents’ legacy can be traced through metaphor analysis. The analyses can become meaningful and valid in unearthing the history of conduct and performance of individual leaders.

Tales of Political Monuments in Malawi: Re-storying National History

ABSTRACTCountries in Africa have many monuments memorialising specific figures and events in the history of their nations. Statuaries feature prominently among these monuments. This paper examines the positioning of three statues in Malawi. One of the statues is that of the first president of the country, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, another is of the third president, Bingu wa Mutharika, and the other – a statue that was never erected – that of India’s national hero, Mohandas Gandhi. Through an examination of the discourse that has emerged around the monuments, the paper argues that these statues exist as articulations of a fluid and changing vision of nationalism in the Malawian imaginary, which sometimes translates into the emphasising of certain aspects of history, while other aspects become reconfigured under nationalist narratives. These articulations are captured in various forms of media, including poetry, academic discourse, online petitions, and social media memes, among others.

The Political Effects of Agricultural Subsidies in Africa: Evidence from Malawi

Across sub-Saharan Africa agricultural subsidy programs have again become a common strategy for combatting rural poverty, increasing agricultural production, and reducing food insecurity. Despite a large literature examining subsidies' effects on output and welfare, little is known about their political effects. This paper examines Malawi's Agricultural Input Subsidy Programme, one of the largest and most expensive programs implemented, which was launched by the government in 2005. We examine whether the incumbent party, the Democratic Progressive Party headed by president Bingu wa Mutharika, benefited from Malawi's subsidy program by examining a longitudinal dataset of 1,846 rural Malawians interviewed in 2008 and again in 2010. The individual-level data show no evidence that the subsidy program was targeted to Mutharika's co-ethnics or co-partisans. Our analysis further demonstrates that the subsidy program increased support for the incumbent party. These results suggest that even when parties are unable or unwilling to target distributional programs at the local level, they may nonetheless derive political benefits. As anti-poverty programs - including agricultural subsidies to small-scale farmers - become increasingly common across the continent, our results suggest that they may help to explain patterns of party affiliation and vote choice, particularly where traditional patterns of partisan affiliation related to ethnic or regional identities weaken.

Africa's passive revolution: crisis in Malawi

Recent protest movements in sub‐Saharan Africa have generally failed to effect progressive transformations. Efforts to achieve social change have been frustrated by governing elites that continue to utilise their vacillating and unequal relationships with the external environment to sustain power. Although the leading figures may change, the dominant African class can re‐establish leadership through new alliances with domestic and international networks of capital. To understand such ‘change‐without‐change’, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature on Antonio Gramsci's development of ‘passive revolution’. The comparative character of Gramscian analysis enables his philosophy of praxis to be translated into very different historical and geographical settings. With this in mind we draw together recent engagements with passive revolution from Geography, Politics and African Studies. In particular we develop Jean‐François Bayart's notion of extraversion, while considering it in relation to more recent philological engagements with Gramsci. Our empirical focus is the politics of transition in Malawi. In his second term in office, the autocratic and unpopular president, Bingu wa Mutharika, implemented economic policies that ran against neoliberal orthodoxy and suppressed protest during a period of crisis. Mutharika was replaced, following his death in 2012, by Joyce Banda, a previously marginalised vice‐president, who nurtured a re‐engagement with transnational capital. Working through the state, Banda led a transformation from on high and moved to impose new economically liberal policies, including a major currency devaluation, which reduced living standards for many. We draw our empirical material from Chancellor College, a major site of protest against Mutharika in 2011. Evidence from interviews with staff and students demonstrates how two episodes of revolution/restoration in Malawi, a country distant from the western historical experience, can be interpreted through Gramsci's socially differentiated understanding of politics.

Human rights – the tension and conflict between church and state in Malawi: 2004-2012

In this paper, I show the critical role played by the Protestant and the Roman Catholic Churches with regard to the government’s abuse of human rights in Malawi in the years 2004 to 2012. I argue that the Protestant and Catholic leaders’ response to Bingu wa Mutharika’s government’s violation of human rights was influenced by a number of factors: first, the Church leaders’ perceptions of Wa Mutharika’s uneasiness about their critical voice. Second were the Church leaders’ perceptions of the weak position of the government. Finally, I argue that though not always uniform or consistent, the churches’ prophetic voice was occasionally undermined by their partisan interests, which sometimes were exploited by the government.

Two ‘transitions’: the political economy of Joyce Banda's rise to power and the related role of civil society organisations in Malawi

When Joyce Banda became Malawi's president in 2012, she was welcomed by the international community as an antidote to the increasingly erratic and autocratic behaviour of her unexpectedly deceased predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika. Banda appeared to be the product of the twin drivers of a ‘rising’ Africa; namely a newly empowered donor-supported civil society on the one hand, and a Western-oriented political elite committed to transparency and good governance on the other. Based on several field trips to Malawi over the past five years, this article seeks to problematise the degree to which Joyce Banda and Malawi's civil society organisations represented a double transition from the more patrimonial form of politics which had dominated the political and civil society sectors throughout Malawi's postcolonial era. Although prepared prior to recent corruption scandals which have engulfed the Banda government in the run-up to elections in May 2014, this article sets the context for understanding these cases as a product of Malawi's political economy and uneven insertion into the global economy.

Interpersonal Metafunctions in Bingu wa Mutharika’s Second-Term Political Discourse: A Systemic Functional Grammatical Approach

Modern studies in discourse analysis have witnessed an increasing interest in presidential political speeches. The major argument has been that the presidential speeches are often ideologically loaded. Hence, analyzing such speeches would provide an insight into their hidden ideologies. This study aims at analyzing Malawi president Bingu wa Mutharika’s inaugural address through the linguistic lens of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) by focusing on choice of mood, modal auxiliary operators, and personal pronouns. Results of mood choices reveal that the address is information-centered as he opted highly for declarative and used imperative sparsely. Modal auxiliary operators of median scale turns out mostly by favoring will. The personal pronoun we, which is followed in majority by I, implies that the speech is exclusive as Mutharika continuously referred to himself and his administration leaving out the citizens. The analysis shows that Mutharika did not perform well on establishing interpersonal relations with the people during his second term. He created distance between him and the citizens and implied a sense of authority, making the addressee experience a feel that he and his administration were a strong team to initiate and implement any development related endeavor; and that the citizens were merely passive receivers and consumers. The study demonstrates how leaders' political discourses unearth a sort of contradictions between their ideologies at early and later stages of their leadership. It further provides sufficient proof that the grammar of speech is not merely a combinational tool of creating correct constructions, but a method of structuring information and transferring ideology.

Presidents and Ideologies: A Transitivity Analysis of Bingu wa Mutharika’s Inaugural Address

The study is set to analyse how the third Malawian president Bingu wa Mutharika manipulated language in his second inaugural address to enhance his political ideologies by using Halliday’s transitivity system as a theoretical framework. Among the six processes outlined in the framework, the study discovers that material processes highly dominate the speech, distantly followed by relational, while verbal processes come third. Material clauses suggest that Bingu construes the world in terms of his past and future happenings by commemorating his first term achievements and setting his administrative and political principles of his next tenure. His choice of actors suggests that Bingu attributes the achievements to himself which is a characteristic of undemocratic leadership style. He also uses a majority of relational identifications to point out to himself and his administration as the main development players. Verbal processes have been used as markers of transition and topic shift; still, he refers to himself as the main sayer. The speech foregrounds Bingu as a leader with autocratic and dictatorship leadership ideologies. The study concludes that such leadership characteristics could be possible reasons that led to his political downfall as his record on good governance, human rights, and political tolerance significantly got worsened in his second term.

From the Great Lakes to the Great Rift Valley: Does Strategic Economic Policy Explain the 2009 Malawi Election?

Ethno-regional voting cleavages have featured in a number of sub-Saharan African states during the third wave of democratization following the end of the Cold War. While the causes and consequences of these cleavages are well studied, there have been surprisingly few attempts to understand how strategies of pan-ethnic or pan-regional coalition building based on distributive economic policies could be employed to secure national electoral coalitions. In this paper we examine if in the 2009 Malawian parliamentary elections the newly-formed national party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), led by the President Binguwa Mutharika used its incumbent position to promote an economic policy based on food security in order to overcome traditional ethno-regional voting patterns and win a nationwide electoral majority. After presenting a formal model of a optimal allocation of an economic resource to overcome ethnic bias and induce vote-switching, we use district-level data in a system of equations to analyze if strategic allocation within the national fertilizer subsidy program contributed to the nation-wide electoral victory of the DPP.

The super-inflation of the presidency in Malawi

The recent peaceful power transition in Malawi following the unanticipated death of the country's president, Bingu wa Mutharika, marked a significant landmark in the country's fragile democracy and an important lesson for Africa. As one of the last countries in southern Africa to undergo political democratisation, Malawi's political culture remained embedded in the norm of patronage whereby ‘good’ and ‘decisive’ leadership is aligned with the centralisation and personalisation of power. Indeed the circumstances leading up to Mrs Joyce Banda's ascension to power demonstrate a notable level of democratic maturation; democratic consolidation in the country has not been entirely realised. The recurring conflict between ambition and upholding the constitution, displayed in the post transition phase by the executive at the cost of good governance, state functionality and sustainable social development, forces one to question the widely celebrated new leadership. Without rendering individuals as victims of an implicitly corrupt structure, the result of these patterns in Malawi has been the creation of a self-perpetuating elite, whereby the rot of the system itself has become the root of public maladministration and unaccountability. This has culminated in a multiparty democracy with an overly celebrated elected leadership that is likely doomed to fall into the same trappings that marked the demise of the previous leadership. By discussing the impact of the imperial presidency on the state of democracy in Malawi under the country's successive presidents – Bakili Muluzi, Bingu wa Mutharika and Joyce Banda – in the post-transition phase, this essay generates scenarios from an analysis of President Banda's short tenure and the experiences of her predecessors.

Malawi in crisis, 2011–12

In mid July 2011 civic activists organised nationwide demonstrations to pressure President Bingu wa Mutharika's government to address deepening economic and governance problems. Government, using d...

Commonwealth Update

There was little progress in negotiations over the disputed ousting of former president Mohamed Nasheed in the Maldives. In a landmark ruling, the former Liberian president Charles Taylor was found guilty of aiding war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone's civil war. Malawi's vice-president Joyce Banda succeeded President Bingu wa Mutharika despite an apparent coup attempt by the brother and ministers of the late Mutharika. There were hopes of a ‘Malaysian spring’ as record numbers of protesters took to the streets. Pakistan's supreme court found the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, guilty of contempt of court. The kingdom of Barotseland declared it was seeking to secede peacefully from Zambia.

Beyond the dark veil: Hope and despair in Bright Molande's Seasons

The focus of this article is on Bright Molande's impressions of Malawi's post-dictatorship era of Bakili Muluzi in Seasons (2010), his first poetry anthology. The author argues that Molande uses his poetry to tease out elements of hopelessness and despair in the Muluzi regime, thereby giving us the impression that freedom in the second republic was an illusion. The author also examines the poet's projection of the idea of hope in the post-Muluzi regime and contends that espousing the bettering of Malawi under Bingu wa Mutharika is the poet's commitment in his poetry.

The Problem with the Dependence on Food Imports in Africa and Pathways to its Solution

The words are still fresh in our minds and hardly any time has passed since the president of Malawi and acting president of the African Union (AU), Bingu wa Mutharika, defended the necessity of having the member states gain food selfsufficiency. His words have a number of considerable repercussions, and propel the dialogue and debate regarding the issue. Undoubtedly, the current food crisis has worsened the problem that this absence of self-sufficiency entails, serving as a motive for action and reflection aimed towards changing this state of affairs. To that end, the current president of Senegal, President Wade, previously went on record harshly criticising the FAO and launching an initiative in his country called the Goana, a campaign for food and abundance. The data illustrate the magnitude of the problem. Let us take, for example, the countries that comprise the Sahel, where the harvest for 2007–8 registered a gross deficit of 913,000 tons of grain, which subsequently had to be imported. Thus, Mali had to import 209 tons, Niger 216 tons, Burkina Faso 313 tons, Cape Verde 102 tons, Mauritania 330 tons and Senegal imported 1,120 tons. In the last three cases, moreover, the quantity imported amounted to more than 40 per cent of what the countries were able to produce. In addition, there are some African countries that dedicate a high percentage of their gross domestic product to paying for their annual commercial food imports; for example, in some years, Sierra Leone has spent 24 per cent and Somalia 12 per cent of their respective gross domestic product on this. It must be noted that this exterior food dependency has not been a historical constant; rather, it is a situation that has come about in just a few decades. One need only go back to the figures for the mid 1970s to see that in all of Sub-Saharan

Neo-patrimonialism, Institutions and Economic Growth: The Case of Malawi, 1964-2009

For significant periods Malawi's economy has performed as well or better than might have been expected given its geographical location and natural resource endowments. Underlying these promising episodes is a pattern of centralised, long‐horizon rent management and technocratic integrity. This case study of ‘developmental patrimonialism’ found that the period 1965–79 was one of centralised, long‐horizon rent management and a vertically disciplined technocracy, and the economy grew healthily; 1980–94, by contrast, was a period in which rent management drifted. Although it remained quite centralised, it became geared more to the short term, while the civil service began to deteriorate as it was politicised. These resulted in a comparatively directionless reform programme. The situation deteriorated still further under President Bakili Muluzi (1994–2004). This was a period of decentralised, short‐horizon rent management and a further deterioration of the state bureaucracy. The economy entered a tailspin. A recovery was made during the first term of President Bingu wa Mutharika (2004–09), who reintroduced some aspects of long‐horizon rent centralisation and promoted a more vertically disciplined technocracy.

Ties that bind? The rise and decline of ethno-regional partisanship in Malawi, 1994–2009

In the first three elections following Malawi's return to democracy in 1993, voting patterns displayed a clear ethno-regional pattern. Then in 2009 the regional pattern broke down in dramatic fashion, with the incumbent President, Bingu wa Mutharika, attracting majority support across all three regions. This article first examines whether ethnic identities were at the root of Malawi's ethno-regional electoral pattern. Our tests show that while ethnic identities were associated with partisan attachments in some areas, regional patterns were more consistently related to other factors, particularly views of the government's performance and the inclusiveness of the ruling party. We then examine the breakdown of the regional pattern, drawing on trend analysis of public opinion data from 1999 to 2008. We show that by 2009 the majority of Malawians in all three regions had come to hold positive views of Mutharika's performance and had come to see his government as inclusive. We conclude, therefore, that shifts in patterns of partisanship had more to do with political factors – Mutharika's symbolic and substantive policies during this first term – than ethnic identities. Malawi reminds us that incumbents, when faced with incentives to construct multi-ethnic support bases, can use the power of the state to reach out across ethnic political boundaries and re-order supposedly entrenched patterns of partisanship.

Malawian Literature after Banda and in the Age of AIDS: A Conversation with Steve Chimombo

Malawian Literature after Banda and in the Age of AIDS: A Conversation with Steve Chimombo Christopher J. Lee Steve Chimombo is one of Malawi’s leading writers, having published poetry, short stories, drama, and a novel over the past three decades. His most well-known work is Napolo and the Python: Selected Poetry, published in Heinemann’s prestigious African Writers Series in 1994. His other titles include The Rainmaker (1978) and Wachiona Ndani? (1983), two plays; The Hyena Wears Darkness (2006), a collection of short fiction; The Wrath of Napolo (2000), a novel; Malawian Oral Literature: The Aesthetics of Indigenous Arts (1988), an academic study; The Culture of Democracy: Language, Literature, the Arts and Politics in Malawi, 1992–94 (1996), a collection of political essays co-authored with his wife, Moira Chimombo; and AIDS Artists and Authors—Popular Responses to the Epidemic: 1985–2006 (2007), a volume that addresses the question of cultural engagement with the HIV/AIDS pandemic over the past two decades. Unlike many of his peers, such as Jack Mapanje and Felix Mnthali, who went into political exile, Chimombo has lived and worked in Malawi for much of his career, having taught at Chancellor College, the University of Malawi, for close to three decades. He has also been involved in the establishment of different organizations, specifically Malawi PEN and the Malawi Writers’ Union (MAWU), and he has been the editor and publisher of WASI, one of the few magazines committed to the arts in Malawi. This conversation was recorded in June 2007 in Zomba, where Chimombo lives with his family. Divided into two sections—one on contemporary Malawian literature and a second on his personal development as a writer—this interview highlights the possibilities and constraints of writing in Malawi today, but by extension elsewhere in Africa, where financial support can be limited, audiences are small, publishing venues are few, and book stores are in decline. Chimombo also discusses the changes that have taken hold since 1994—when Hastings Kamuzu Banda stepped down, having been president of Malawi since independence in 1964—as well as the impact HIV/AIDS has had on artistic production. Overall, this conversation engages with trends in Malawian literature over the past several decades, in addition to offering a portrait of Chimombo’s own involvement within this context of growth and change. [End Page 33] On Malawian Literature Today—Writing and Publishing in the Post-Banda Era Christopher Lee (CL) : What is the current state of Malawian literature today? Steve Chimombo (SC) : Since 1994—that is, after Dr. Banda’s republic, the first republic—seven novels have appeared so far in English, some of them by authors who were writing during Banda’s day, some of them new. For example, B. M. Kayira’s Tremors of the Jungle (1996) portrayed a riot at a university campus that ends with the protagonist going into exile. James Ng’ombe, who was quite prolific and wrote two or three novels during the Banda days, has written Madala’s Children (1996), a saga of a family caught up in the politics of Banda, in which brother turns upon brother. He wrote another novel on the same family in 2005, Madala’s Grandchildren. It’s a sequel focusing on the grandchildren’s domestic problems, but in the context of the political scene; the protagonist is also caught up in the politics of succession of the third republic under Bingu wa Mutharika. Another novel by Felix Mnthali is Yoranivyoto (1998), which is a reconstruction of the story of a woman who chooses to remain single when she is so young. It turns out that it is because her husband was in detention. Both Mnthali and Kayira are writing in exile. Mnthali was detained during the Banda days, but doesn’t appear to want to come back. An interesting development during this period has been the appearance of writing by members of the local Asian community. One novel called Intensity of a Dream (2000) by Shan Sacranie addresses the participation of Asians in the politics of independence, a topic that has never been tackled by a Malawian before. Intensity of a Dream is basically about two young men—one Asian...

Democracy as a Limiting Factor for Politicised Cultural Populism in Malawi

Though Malawian democracy could still be described as in transition from authoritarianism, it has enabled an atmosphere for critical debate of and dissent against seemingly popular opinions, which was not possible during the authoritarian rule of former life president, Dr. H. K. Banda, 1964–1994. This article examines politicised cultural populism in Malawi under the dictatorship and democracy in comparative terms. President Banda, as a political populist, appropriated culture to legitimate and validate his political power as well as to cultivate popular support from the majority of ordinary people. Following reforms towards democracy since 1992, his successors have also tended towards populist politics by similarly appropriating culture and cultural activities, among other means, to cultivate popular support from mostly ordinary people for their regimes. Such politicised cultural populism involves adopting traditional roles, cultural symbols and images of power such as praise-titles, and participating in cultural activities such as traditional dances. This article examines the efforts of President Bingu wa Mutharika in the democratic dispensation to appropriate cultural artefacts used by Banda during a dictatorship in order to cultivate popular support for his regime. The article argues that Bingu's efforts at politicised cultural populism are constrained, among other factors, by the nature and climate of democratic politics mainly because democracy, unlike a dictatorship, enables critical debate and the questioning of political leader's behaviour and their motives.