2 History and Sociability
2.3 From Nyasaland to Contemporary Malawi
2.3.2 Tying these Claims to Historical Events
2.3.2.5 The Ambivalence of Control versus Disaggregated/Individualized Citizenship As has already been put forward, Aggregated Citizenship entails automatic dictatorship because
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life struggling for their own power to categorize and legitimize social action. See more on this below under the section on “Social Theorizing the Sociology of Malawi…”
2.3.2.5 The Ambivalence of Control versus Disaggregated/Individualized Citizenship
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collectivism whose returns, though greater in magnitude, are dependent on the committed efforts of numerous other actors – whose commitment, however, cannot be conclusively ascertained by the individual actor.
This condition therefore allows for the mutual holding of inherently contradictory concepts towards “State control and forfeited individual rights” on the one hand, and “individual-centric citizenship and excessive fluidity” on the other (see Mamdani’s (2001) tension of developmental political power versus preservationist human rights).
This ambivalence can be seen in the lacklustre attitude generally held towards the powers of the president. For example, the president of Malawi is expected to be the benevolent custodian of the state while also jointly being expected to work within the limitations on the usage of presidential power as determined by a constitutional democracy. This line is however extremely vague as will be illustrated below but it is quite easily seen in the manner in which the Constitution Act of 1994 was drafted.
In the Malawian constitution the executive, even after the removal of the single-party government, enjoys expansive powers again for the purposes of fast-tracking development (even at the expense of certain rights), and yet within that same constitution, the Judiciary is given broad and expansive powers to block and review any action of the executive (in order to respect and preserve rights) if so moved by anyone with appropriate standing in relation to that matter brought before the courts (Malawi Constitution Act, 1994; Nkhata, In Press). The legislature is given the traditional powers of enacting laws, while the more extraordinary powers of say impeachment remain largely subverted by the presidential system of government that Malawi is.
The legislature is therefore a celebrated political forum whose contributions to the Malawian society are largely mitigated by the involvement of the two more dominant branches of the Executive and the Judiciary.99 In recent times, parliament has demonstrated little ability to impose itself on any matter in an independent way. Its actions are either blocked by Court Injunctions when citizens and even Parliamentarians challenge their legality (in view of human
99 In 2010-2011, the Malawi parliament was evidently under duress by the president to enact legislation that was clearly not in the interest of the public if not for the mere accumulation of power for the president. After the president’s sudden death, the same parliament with the same members repealed all the laws they had themselves recently enacted at the behest of the new president, Joyce Banda. Through the Courts, various citizens had shown defiance to the presidency by moving the judiciary to block various actions and decrees by the executive, for instance, the decree to ban all public demonstrations. See articles on these events at http://www.mwnation.com search Parliament Repeals Laws.
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rights violations), or induced or overridden by the executive (in view of developmental prerogatives).100
In 2004 when President Bingu wa Mutharika came to power, and later formed his own political party following a breakaway from the UDF on whose ticket he got elected, he began to exercise powers that were largely in spirit unsupported by the Malawian Constitution.101 However, because of the perceived economic successes102 of his unconstitutional actions, he was widely heralded as a visionary and revolutionary leader who, as a result, was accorded the leeway to override “regulations or laws” in the national interest by the public. These overridden
“regulations and laws” were however the very foundations whereupon individualized citizenship (embedded in rights) was anchored, and yet, in the interest of the “Malawi nation – as an aggregate” these regulations or “expressions of individualized citizenship” could be from time to time muted. For instance, there were questions as to how the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) had been able to run for four consecutive years from 2005 to 2009 when Parliament had voted against MBC’s government funding because of their overtly pro-government and anti- opposition slant in their programming. These concerns rang on deaf ears in the public domain, as the population remained fixated on the 7 per cent plus Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates, and the successes of the Farm Inputs Subsidy Programmes (FISPs) which had empowered farmers to produce more than enough staple food for the country following previous years of famine. Once more, those who opposed Mutharika were construed as the enemies of the
100 Consider the injunction that has kept the speaker’s hands tied for close to two years on the matter of declaring vacant the seats of MPs who crossed the floor from one political party to another in parliament. Also, other incidences include when parliament voted to suspend Kalinde MP for misconduct in the house only to have the Courts block that decision and re-instate Kalinde back into Parliament; source http://www.zodiakmalawi.com search Kalinde and Section 65.
101 The Malawi Supreme Court of Appeal ruling “In the matter of the question of the crossing the floor by members of the National Assembly” is illustrative. This ruling was never implemented by the President, who actually requested it in the first place through Presidential Reference. Upholding this ruling would have had implications on his tenure, as he would have lost members in parliament who were keeping him from impeachment. He would thus open parliament, force them to discuss other business, and once the impeachment issue came up, he would use Presidential Powers to close parliament. See also Malawi Leader Suspends Parliament Over Budget Row (Mail&Guardian, 20 June, 2008; http://mg.co.za/article/2008-06-20-Malawi-Leader-Suspends-Parliament-Over- Budget-Row)
102 See www.finance.mw.gov for recent reports on their homepage from around 2004-5 on macro-economic performance; Malawi is said to have achieved economic growth of over 7% since 2005 up until 2009-10. See also the Reserve Bank of Malawi website www.rbm.com which also has monetary reports attesting to the same successes.
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“nation” without a real assessment of the individual merits or de-merits of the concerns they were raising.
Come 2009, following a “landslide” victory at the national polls, Mutharika would take a more visible and deliberate posture in effecting certain policy positions by the Malawi government now blanketed in his own “nationalism” concepts. It would not be unfair to speculate that Mutharika saw his popularity which for the first time had cut across regional and ethnic divides as a basis from which he could begin to construct a political and cultural hegemony that would consolidate his powers as president (see Chirambo, 2009). There are several similarities between Mutharika’s attempts to realize this and what Banda did to realize his own hegemony from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Put simply, those who wanted Malawi to attain to even greater strides in its development objectives were to surrender certain individual freedoms and allow the president the leeway to make unilateral decisions, which Malawians would later be thankful for.
Generally, in the interest of Malawi, certain sacrifices – often in the form of political opponents – would be undertaken. The difference between Mutharika’s time and that of Banda was not just marked by the existence of a vibrant and growing independent press (print and oral) and the availability of information gadgets within the context of a more interconnected globe but also in the breaking open of the monotonies that prevented people from speaking out about the unintended messages being pushed out by State propaganda outlets (Chirambo, 2009). While in Banda’s time suspicions around the intentions of government were kept within the individual and out of the public sphere, in Mutharika’s time whatever people thought a “message” meant could be spewed onto the public sphere via the many channels in the media as well as in everyday conversations, as well as in their actions.103 And as the state overtly pursued and sanctioned dissenting individuals and groups, the more illegitimate the state appeared and the more it undermined its government’s longevity and stability.
The Malawi economy declined sharply particularly during and after 2010 due in part to the global recession as well as a poor rainy season for the rain-fed agriculture. The national budget of 2010 introduced more taxes to make up for the lack of traditional support of the donor community because of Mutharika’s increased antagonistic stance towards them.104 Under these
103 When this study proposes some techniques of researching intersubjectivity, this notion of the “other side of a message” will be elaborated. The presence of silence could be seen as indicating both an enabling as well as disabling discourse pertaining to the accessibility of certain performances in the social sphere or public domain. An intriguing account from Mponela in Dowa District in Malawi is used to illustrate this point further.
104 A standard search on the Nation Newspaper website mwnation.com with the key words British Ambassador Expulsion will bring out numerous columns, reports and opinions on the state of the Malawi Economy vis-à-vis
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circumstances the notions of individualized citizenship once more began to rise to the fore.
Here, as the collectivism of aggregated citizenship was collapsing, regional and ethnic tensions were re-emerging, and people needed their individual rights re-emphasized so that they could take a more deliberate posture in matters that most affected them – that is, to disband from the conformity to an aggregated citizenship into a pluralism of individualism whose content would be backed by the legitimating efforts of the concerned social actor.
Mutharika and his regime were repeatedly challenged, through the Malawian civil society as well as the Malawi Judiciary, on scantly elaborated grounds of constitutionalism.105 They condemned his disregard for “individual” human rights such as the freedoms to peacefully assemble, to express one-self and to freely associate with organizations and groupings of one’s choosing without political sanctions. They also condemned a secretive government, and called for the respecting of citizens’ rights to open, inclusive, transparent and accountable government.
However, what is very interesting about these various admonitions is the lack of clearly articulated demands to render and establish nationhood as a concept founded upon
“individualized citizenship” rather than “aggregated ones”. This is inferred from the manner in which the demands are channelled not as calls for an elaboration of constitutional provisions by say an enactment of enabling legislature but rather as directed calls at the president for him to pursue a self-informed attitude of accommodating alternative views, desisting from the intimidation of perceived political rivals, intentionally submitting to the authority of the courts and other self-regulated temperaments towards various individuals, groups or organizations.
The telling feature about the content of these requests is that they were anchored upon the ambivalence stated above which further portrays “individual citizenship” as a practical logic of sociability or a sociability imperative in Malawi, and “aggregated citizenship” as a collectively orchestrated effort towards nation-building as “dictated” and handed down by a benevolent leader.106 More so, therefore, the constitution was not read in terms of what it absolutely implies
ailing diplomatic relations with donor countries. Note that Mutharika had ordered the expulsion of the British Ambassador because of a leaked cable to London in which the Ambassador had called him autocratic.
105 See Appendix 6.3 for a full petition to the President from a coalition of civil society groups presented on July 20th, 2011 sourced from the online Newspaper Malawi NyasaTimes at www.nyasatimes.com search “CSO Petition”
106 Further down in the Methodology section, this notion of the “content” of social action will be important in overcoming the objectivity problem from subjectivity. Content will be shown as carrying aspects of intersubjectivity which enables the social researcher to “see” or “visualize” the social ontology that informs the specific rendering of a particular social action in a particular context. Social action is therefore constituted at least
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but rather in terms of a content that would be socially legitimate and vaguely intentional, by drawing upon the social, political and historical practices of the Malawian society.107 This ambivalent stance is inherently always open to incidences of political totalitarianism activated by the need to arrive at a concept of nationhood precisely because nation concepts are drawn or excavated from the sentimental past of Malawi’s history. And yet this ambivalent stance is also expressed as a haphazard individual-centric resistance informed by a perceived threat in the establishment towards one’s ability to attain egocentric, ethnocentric or generally group-centric goals which are however intentionally portrayed as an affront on the “vague” national collective.
The repercussions of such a situation or condition necessarily result in some of the observations to be further elaborated in the section “An African Modernity and its Rationality”.
2.3.2.6 The Individualized Citizen and the Performances108 of their Re-Found