Mutuwoyera - Grey haired Citizens Doing It For their Youth

When I invited a few colleagues to join the Youngambitiousbusinessachievers club, on Yahoo Groups, one of these responded favorably and mentioned how concerned he was that [1] he was getting grey-haired and [2] he was now a grandee and yet he had done very little to bequeath something of worth to his future progenies. This then reminded me of a piece—called 'Mut'oyera-Grey Haired'—that I had done in 2002.

Now I reproduce it here—because despite the passage of time and the fact that the most recent book publication around here is normally from 15 years dated—things don't change much. We live in a time warp. My piece is still very relevant! By the way none of the friends I invited to the club—almost a month now—has yet registered; despite having expressed the desire and/or excitement with the possibilities. Time Warped!

*******

For donkey years—to no avail—you've sent out your CV to collegemates—now senior managers in various organizations. Unfortunately everyone is “too dense” to recognize the uncut diamond you are to this nation's processes of economic development.

Instead, you sit and bemoan your misfortunes arguing:

“There aren’t special graveyards for “unsung heroes”.

And—rather too frequently—nowadays with some colleagues you turn up at the corner bottle store—the “Drunkie”—to drown your sorrows.

While there you “jaw” all day: criticizing THIS government and swiping at the “Under 45s” college graduates now holding decent jobs in town. En masse, you always arrive at the conclusion that most of  the "Under 45s" are in those jobs ‘courtesy to their brainlessness’. This is because you erroneously believe—may be rightly so—you have superior ideas and skills to pull this place out of its ‘forex and fuel crisis’ instigated by Kamuzu Banda and perfected by us all thereafter.

Of course you know your vibrant ideas and skills are wasting. Last time you suggested a brain-challenging adventure to your local Lions Club the colleagues in there all stared at you like you had just smeared horse manure onto your nose. But why worry with the Lions Club? Isn’t that a union of some sort? Their first priority is with protecting like members' interests? Brainy ideas—no matter how potentially good—are not encouraged in there: especially if they threaten the reputation of the management committee.

Yet, the wealth of the massive knowledge in you is hurting. You'd love to purposefully use it. So why not organize your own ‘Lions Club'—invite all those “jawing” friends of yours into an indigenous “Mut’oyera” Club—‘whiteheads’ because you're now grey haired? Of course—because you are unemployed and reliant on your wife’s sweat—make sure that you tag along an “Over 45” lawyer to donate your ‘start up’ legal fees because—in these days of litigation and injunctions—you shall have to be legally registered.

Once the Mut’oyera is up and running, you can share constructive ideas towards “novel, unique and applicable solutions to everyday development problems of this country”; because those above you are simply lost in this wierd wilderness of 'development cognitiveness'.

In this Mut’oyera—without brain-confusing fumes of alcohol and the usual Lions Club nkhukutembo-ism—organize yourselves into various “job and hope-creating” interventionary groups. I’m currently not talking about picking a hoe, a plastic plate and heading down the Kanjedza “shortcut” to clear out some footpath brush. But there is sense in that too!

Rather, it’s about major brainy things done through self-help and—where not possible because of the size of project—then petition THIS government to release some of your “Youth Development Program” VAT-generated funds. There are there. If not then ask them to impose such a source within the fuel levy.

But—if government is not forthcoming on that—then talk/ write [in that specific order] to certain private companies where those mystically powerful “Under 45s” are currently holding sway. They will probably chip in with their idle marketing and public relations budgets. In short, grab whatever “starter funding” is available and get going. Of course, don’t start an “overheads-hungry” NGO!

What good things can old guys like you do?

A good example is: whatever happened to all those Youth Training Bases from Kamuzu’s days? Were those not categorized as “abused” government properties during the Second Regime? Well, its high time THIS government made them available to you—decent, behaved and well-meaning nationals. Get organized, invite a few Kibbutz Israelis—damn the political connotations—and pile into there a few idle and “unemployable youth” roaming the streets and now breaking into houses in broad daylight.

Between you and your “never-to-be-employed again” Mut’oyera colleagues assemble all that corporate drive in you and panel beat this youthful raw material into a new and vital national development resource. Not Young Pioneer drills—that’s old cloth. But get them to grow more cabbage or raise chicken feet—the Chinese need those a lot! Meanwhile let me plead with your socially responsible economic intelligence to make sure those places are self-sufficient within the four months a crop of maize is harvested! No dilly-dallying, you hear?

Your first target is those Young Pioneer bases close to perennial water sources—irrigable land capable of a million tons of exportable surplus! So who said you will never be gainfully employed and unselfishly available to your nation? But, this is not an opportunity for you to get your belated pension through the back door!

A second and low-cost concept is to avail your Mut’oyera Club to anyone needing “senior intelligence” to transform this country into a workable MGDS Export-Orientated system. Four, now going five years after the MGDS—with everyone “Under 45s” in their offices mouthing sweet terms like ‘value-chain’, ‘value-add’ and ‘beneficiation’—you will be surprised to tears with the answers you get when you further interrogate: 

‘What do you actually mean by that?’

They have no idea—all round—and if they do they don’t even know which soft belly point we ought to trigger to get the process going. They are fobbing us all the while the economy goes to the dogs. It's about protecting their 'msuzi'—nothing else much! And who is to blame them if those who assigned them are equally foggied?

The reality, though, under the veneer of “brass button shine” smiles these people are actually screaming for help. Simply venture into any local government office today and bear me witness by asking—it is your democratic right too—to see the local authority’s so-called “Economic Development Plans”. I did once.

In a flash the secretary—keen to defend the night allowances she earned at a series of ‘Development Plan Consultation Conferences’—fished out one glossy, overpriced and professionally printed document. But—I must warn you because I wasn’t forewarned—be prepared to be shocked! The ‘Plan’—funded by some foreign donor and technical support to boot—turned out to be the stuff we used, in those glorious colonial days, to call ‘Compendium’ or ‘Background and Environment analysis" notes!

‘That’s it!’ I had inquired.

She had looked at me with the lesbianite peacock-ism today's young girls adopt towards potential 'adult male molesters' and had asked: ‘Pali china?’

The “plans” being developed on our behalf—and I advise you Mut’oyeras to improve on these otherwise this nation is on a journey to Heaven in a leaky basket—are mere lists of what is available in a particular specialty. Finito! Whereupon they declare war on Rudyard Kipling’s six honest serving men: What, Why, When, How, Where, and Who. They contain no action plans, no deliverables, no champions and no delivery dates. Zilch!

So—I dare urge you—set up those non-profit "Corporate Systems Empowering" Mut’oyera Clubs. Go in there—with the executive government blessings of course—and give these “plans” some export-creating teeth. Hopefully—as you leave—someone will offer you a much-needed bottle of beer!

Seriously, Mut’oyera Clubs should offer an exports-hungry nation more than the biblical “fishing net”. In the trembling hands of a hungry man fishing nets—without a canoe, a water body full of fish and a forest for canoe logs etc—are useless luxuries. That was the problem with Kamuzu’s ‘tool box’ model and it is still we us to this day.

Mut’oyera Clubs go in there and provide hungry men with carpentry skills to hew out trees for canoes, strip bark for fishing net ropes and ability to paddle to where they smell fish. The rest—should they ever get hungry again—is easy.

While we feverishly work to sort out the "comments' problem, please feel free to contact the author at zivaiclaude@gmail.com

Photos and Colorful Dreams in Practical Economics

Picture this: A few national dailies are carrying a story that President Obama and his Chinese counterpart are due in the country late this afternoon using one of our very own Chidweya airplane. They are here to meet our State President—to discuss how our country could financially bail out the US economy so that the Americans can then pay off their ever-growing debt with the Chinese!

Already our State President has been to Parliament Buildings—to address a joint sitting of MPs and the Council of Brainy Nationals [CBNs]. The CBNs is a new Chamber of Parliament created to ensure that people with sufficient grey matter between their ears are directly involved in ensuring—as part of our national Strategic Independence—the national economy is in tic-toc state of export-driven economic growth. In fact, one of those CBNs is the ‘godfather’ of the Chidweya technologies that the Americans' NASA is now keen to use on their manned shuttles to the outer edge of the galaxy: go and see some funny beings reportedly living there!

Naturally, an hour ago the State President emerged from parliament buildings more fiesty and envigorated to take the fight to the other two superpowers. Thanks to the CBNs and the fast growing national export economy, the political trade off would be us demanding our rightful place in global decision making! And right time too.

Cut! Dula! Cut! This is some ufiti dream, kapena?

How did we get here—from that messy ISI thing Kamuzu bequethed us? There has to be a process. The diagram below—another of the over-abused three-part ‘value-chain’—endeavors to demonstrate how. It is still about terminologies but these—for a change—are more organized and purposeful. At least the general tone is not 'anti-people' and/ or 'unpeople'.

First, a valuable lesson in history. Mercantilism has been with us since 1493. That is when Martin Luther of Gotenberg posted his letter on the wall; berating the Roman Catholic Church. He told them to get off their high horse that insisted the ‘church’ was the beginning and end of all life. Luther wanted a separation of powers between economics and metaphysics. The church had no right to interfere in earthly matters everytime poverty walked the world. In fact, for getting organized into Capitalism, Luther wanted change. He got it. The church resisted and the Protestant church was born again and again. In turn, artisans—in their homesteads—were released from their guild obligations. They become part of a more organized production system. Later factories—involving a few guild societies would emerge—went into specialization and efficient coordination of national resources from one human system to the other. The quest for Strategic Independence was born; slaves would be caught and sold, Africa would be partitioned and globalization, as we know it to day, would come. But I anticipate myself.

More importantly Mercantilism—defined as 'a nation manufacturing and exporting to earn bullion and wealth'—was born. J. Michael Friend [WTO: Trade and Development Handbook] has given a practical and brutal definition of mercantilism as: 'the scientific art of pushing one’s 'thieving' hand into your neighbor’s pocket while working ever so hard to remove his 'thieving' hand from your pocket'. Kamuzu—the so called student of Roman and Mercantile history and a church-elder to boot—failed to fully understand this aspect of the gentlemanly art at trickery.

Kamuzu’s ISI was basically a failed ‘rent seeking’ adventure. J. Michael Friend calls ‘rent-seeking’: 'the art of pushing one's hand into one’s own pocket while pretending nothing is amiss'! Sounds familiar? All you students and products of Kamuzu are rent seekers. Self-thieving artists! You are no more different from the guy who gives spare money to his wife in the morning—to bake some ‘mandasi’ to sell outside his posh house in the suburbs—'hoping' some passerby will purchase them. First mistake—operating on unfounded hope. The second and rent seeking mistake is to return home in the evening—find the mandasi still unsold—and 'throw' a one-man tea party on your very own ‘mandasi’! That is the cleverness of an idiot and we have been doing that for the last forty-seven years. You know the familiar saying: ‘kulima mlimi’ or building ADMARC flats with peasant surpluses or driving your posh Merc using peasant-earned forex and fuel. Sounds fiendishly clever when we did it, isn't it? But it is rent-seeking because all this long we have been pushing a ‘thieving’ hand in our own pockets and tickling what really ought not be tickled down there.

The above is a Mercantilist or Export-oriented approach to industrialization [EOI]. Kamuzu thought he had it when he designed the ISI one [discussed in my previous blog]. As said, the Mercantilist concept has been around ever since. But—for various reasons—we chose against it. EOI is now implied in the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy [MGDS] of 2007. However—once you have tasted Kamuzu's ISI ‘easy-way-out’—EOI is quite a taxing pursuit. It’s like asking a selfish man to experience a woman’s labor pains. His typical response will be: 'To what end but the anticipation of future illusory pleasures!' 

EOI is about rearranging our communities from ‘homestead’ to the ‘export city’. Capitalism—since Martin Luther—organized the guilds or the peasant villagers of today into structured systems of production. Using the resultant system Capitalism was able to physically invade enemy’s territory to market their products. That is why subsidiaries of transnational companies [TNCs]—providing us with everything from detergent to soft drinks—are in our backyard. Where is our TNCs in their backyards? Yes, they have their profligate hand in our pocket. Yes, the other year [when their cousins had a field day destroying Kamuzu’s ‘toy’ industries in Makata and Kanengo] they destroyed our capacity to put a hand into their pockets!

So, were we defeated? Can we not organize ourselves towards that single objective—'pushing our 'thieving' hand into their pocket with little collateral losses to us'. It is possible if we organize ourselves because Mercantilism is a single-minded pursuit. You cannot, unfortunately, afford to have internal definitions leading to internal fractus—running 'thieving-hand' clubs against your own people; stealing from the poor in the countryside.

In my previous blog I showed how we are good at mouthing and perfecting self-thieving concepts, terminologies and arguments. We even promote defeatist arguments on why EOI was not made in and is not for this country. We have come full circle though. Given, no one wants to smoke our tobacco we need—and very fast!—to define an alternative accumulation system. This one should be based on a hierarchy of internal competence-exploitation in pursuit of wealth extracted from our external neighbors. Put crudely: we need better 'thieving' techniques to relieve our neighbors of their hard earned wealth!

And the external environment has changed. Damn these whites: always shifting the goalposts every time we have something good going for us! Unlike in the olden Capitalist days when slaves, then serfs and finally paid labor were readily available sources of surplus that one could capture, the 'foreign customer' is now the new Capitalist ‘slave’. And, boy, is she smart, fickle and elusive! To trap the contents of her purse, you really have to be on top of your game. One slip and your whole national economy is in tatters.

All the more reason, see diagram, we need secure internal self-sufficiency and economic self-defense strategies. These must be set far back into the national system; not the Kamuzu mistake that had these right at the national-global axis. Protect these just so the Capitalist ‘slave’ experiences one of her periodic bust cycles and your thieving hand has to come out and temporarily rely on internal reserve in the rent-seeking pocket [RSP]. The problem with the Kamuzu model is we have over relied on the 'sufficiency' sector that it has collapsed on us.

That RSP happens to be the local 'rurals' and we have been stealing from them blindly. And, girl, are the 'rurals' are urbanizing like hell. Sixty percent of us will be living in towns by 2050 and if we do not properly reach out and link hands with these future neighbors then brace for the universal squalor that is coming.

Compared to the ISI diagram, the EOI looks and sounds quite simple. It is like the other man said: 'it takes fifteen muscles to smile and hundreds more to look serious and intimidating'. Yet, we simply love to look intimidating—complicate our lives as the ISI diagrams shows. But, a chabwino thing is never complicated. ISI is complicated yet looks deceptively simple. EOI is easy because it is simple.

Whichever way we cannot continue to steal and abuse the very poor who are the foundations of our future growth and development and wonder why we are still poor forty-seven years later!  The reasons are in our rent-seeking nature. But so be it—if some guys renders himself exploitable by all means go ahead; help him maximize his self-imposed stupidity. The unfortunate part is that the self-sacrificing, exploitable person is no other than ourselves! Yes—you the product of Kamuzu’s teachings. We are the one’s with the persecution complex—avidly pandering to ISI teachings and way of life.

It was us—for no obvious benefit—who cheered Kamuzu when he drove the Asians out of No1 in Thyolo or Songani in Zomba. Just so the places could become perfect 'economic deserts' they are today! Shooting ourselves in the foot is what we achieved because in that act we ‘forced’ the rural poor to frequent the same cities we had once declared 'no-go' areas to them. And when they arrived—this time disguised as ‘thieves’ and ‘vendors’—what did we do? We avidly drove them out. Remember ‘Operation Dongosolo’? That had nothing to do with the Boss on the hill or the IMF saying so. Those guys simply okayed what we had wanted all along—get those ‘khwema-rized’ peasants out of our cities!

What kind of love-hate relationship do we have here? What exactly do we want: The poor in the countryside? The poor among us? And we think we can build a united country without getting this human dynamic right once and for all? Either, we are united Mercantilist or divided Rent-seekers.

That decided it become easy to determine into whose pocket we really ought to push our 'thieving' hand. We cannot dispatch away our peasants every time a TNC lies that it is operating in this country because it wants to help us ‘export’ what its parent company is already ‘exporting’ into our economy! Those TNC subsidiaries around you are counters or outlets for their parent companies. They have no mandate to re-export nothing! There's is a clever turn of phrase to babies in development economics. We are adults around here, aren't we?

Let's build a properly integrated EOI production system that starts with enjoining rural smells to our ambitions to rule the world.

While we feverishly work to sort out the "comments' problem, please feel free to contact the author at zivaiclaude@gmail.com

Pictures and Words in Practical Economics

Picture this: The Chidweya is a Malawian first in the aeronautics export sector. And it is doing roaring business around the world. The Chidweya is an ultrasonic airplane—designed on the ‘chidude’ principle—that has broken all supreme-sonic records by flying between Lilongwe and London in the blink of an eye! President Obama and his Chinese counterpart are reportedly keen to travel on the newly launched Malawian Chidude Airways—shortened ‘Chidweya’—and there are rumors they may place orders—in their hundreds—for this airplane. Finally, forex in bucket loads!

Manufactured in a brand new factory somewhere in the middle of Malawi—state laws forbid me saying exactly where: because since flight testing, global spies, governments and national airlines have been making a beeline to Malawi. Our hotels—recently suffering 60% vacancy rates—are reportedly doing ‘kutapa kutaya’ business; which is an aberation really given with the Chidweya foreign visitors to Malawi can literary come and go on the same day. But tentative research suggests most visitors are staying on to perform one or two ‘Aunt Tiwo and Chimbalanga’ escapades. We really ought to market that aspect strongly too!

Did you picture that? Words, words, words just to describe the Chidweya. Why didn’t I just draw you a Chidweya picture? There is a popular observation that a ‘picture replaces a thousand words’ and sometimes words can actually distort reality. I want now to use that to demonstrate what is happening around this country of ours in terms of economics and related social development.

The diagram below is, in fact, the popular three-part ‘value-chain’ that everyone in Malawi—drunk or otherwise—is finding quite popular to mouth about! Words, terms and pictures! However, in this blog I will deal with the Import Substitution Industrialization [ISI] value chain and the plethora of terminologies and mis-policies it has spawned.

We inherited the ISI model from Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda [aka Kamuzu] when he decided, in 1964, this would be the means to our ‘strategic independence’. Back then Kamuzu reasoned—to a lot of ululation [for ‘kicking out Roy Welensky and his British cousins’]—the more we manufactured the more politically independent we would become. Note, I did not say what was to be ‘manufactured’, did I? Neither did he see the subtle diffrence!

The ISI model was not as novel as Kamuzu would have us believe. Neither had it been properly tested elsewhere. However—when it did rounds in State Houses of the day—it was also called the ‘Take off’ or ‘Catch Up’ model. All the more reason a decent man should be worried with a model that comes packaged in such simplistic names!

But not Kamuzu. He was grandiosely convinced that through local industrialization—at Makata and Kanengo—Malawi would ‘take off’ and ‘catch up’ with Britain. Then, it would be payback time to the British for incarcerating him at Gweru! Besides, ‘take off’ had other ulterior attractions to Kamuzu. More later.

But, ISI model had requirements and caveats that Kamuzu—the ‘one-eyed-philosopher-king-among-the-blind’—chose to ignore. For instance, ISI industrialization—as applied to Japan—that bare piece of rock, prone to earthquakes and Tsunamis—seemed to work quite efficiently. So Kamuzu’s ‘one-eyed mind’ reasoned imported critical inputs would arrive from abroad, get manufactured into finished products and then sent back into the global market! That was his definition of  value-addition. Indeed, some clever oaks—‘talking faces’ on radio, TV and media in Malawi—are currently calling it by the same name. Warning to you 'false prophets' on our 'lies box', we all cheru!

But, Kamuzu's ISI model needed ‘forex’. Silly! So, where do you start? Manufacture finished goods and sell them and acquire more inputs? A typical ‘chicken-before-egg’ assumption. Or—and this is the reality check—you take the egg-before-chicken approach: i.e. find forex for inputs, manufacture and then sell to complete the cycle. The latter approach needs a prior egg nest though. In 1964, Malawi—mineral challenged as it was assumed—simply did not have a hidden penny box somewhere. So, anyway, the one-eyed philosopher king decided: ‘Chicken-first!’

It was messed up logic which is why—when reason intervened—Kamuzu would occassionally say, in public speeches: ‘Malawi must develop its agriculture so that we can process some of these agricultural commodities into finished products’.

And the guy who used to translate such confused ‘Kamuzuist Economics’ into Chichewa would further garbled the message. And we all ululated in confused exhilaration! But here is the catch...

Generally, Kamuzu didn’t mean ‘we’ [all Malawians] were required to lay the eggs for his ‘industrial dream’ in Makata etc to be ‘processed’ [hatched] into real chickens! Instead, Kamuzu utterances were confusingly famous for the three pillars for ‘His’ people—the villagers by the way. These were: food, clothes and shelter. Just yesterday a ‘lies box face’ said this is just what we need in the forthcoming cabinet appointments!

Yet, in the same breathe, Kamuzu was infamous for the Special Crops Act of 1972. This stopped peasant farmers—outside his established tobacco estates—from growing tobacco, sugar and tea. He practically stopped 400,000 Malawian peasants from participating in processes of delivering the valuable eggs he needed for his ‘industrial chicken’ to succeed! Indeed—even when it became obvious that the ‘trickle down’ associated with ‘take off’ was not happening—Kamuzu remained ‘nga-nga-nga’ tied his unworkable chicken-before-egg approach because for an unexplainable reason ‘His’ people were to seriously remain outside his grand design of developing Malawi.

In the above diagram you can see that the rural poor in their homesteads, villages and periodic markets. That's where he wanted them; generally enjoying the fruits of susbsistence production and traditional dances after the rain season. If the poor worked hard, it was to find Kamuzu’s ‘poll tax’ just so we would avoid being chased around by his ‘andumiles’!

But, it got worse over time. Once we—especially those in cities—tasted our tickey’s worth of imported soft drink we would not let go. So, more soft drink inputs were brought into the country and foreign salesmen—once back home—announced to packed board meeting: ‘They’re barefooted but, boy, do they lap up our stuff!’

The vicious circle we live in today—import, feed and import with no exports—had begun in earnest. Just this month Coca-cola was off the shelves. Blame it on the confused white supply chain manager in that organization but the truth remains forex to import the concentrates had run dry. Meantime, Kamuzu really needed to rule Malawi for over thirty years hence his desperation to make his ISI ‘chicken-without-eggs’ model work. So, he adopted the qualities of a chameleon changing his tune as he saw fit. ISI came to mean: ‘autarky’ guarantees ‘self-sufficiency’. In reality, autarky sought to isolate Malawi—you and me—from the prying eyes of foreigners. So ring-fenced, Kamuzu—‘the one-eyed philosopher-king-gone-policy-blind’—could lead his ’blind’ sheep into oblivion. It is at this point he perfected his double-speak approaches—making him, next to Hitler’s Goebbels, the best propagandist to walk the shores of Malawi!

But down in the vilages, a bottle of imported soft drink was enough to have most of us resolve, there and there, that 'in town was where we would die'. I practically went to school so I could write the rubbish you are now reading. And live in a city as the reward for my sweat. In the diagram above, We still live in Kamuzu's district centers, rural growth centers, secondary towns and his ISI cities. Not a lot has changed since the guy departed! But, because this was not Communist Russia where one needed gate passes to live anywhere, also came to town my other unschooled friends. Soon, in droves we arrived into Kamuzu’s ISI cities—including his brand new capital city in Lilongwe. The cities all had one thing in common: directionless import-driven citadels, lacking in a veritable economic engine to sustain them.

But, the arrival of country bumpkins—messing up the central tenant of his ‘Take off’ ISI model—didn’t much please Kamuzu. Remember, the ISI model was built on the ‘spearhead’ principle: only the spear's head—not the shaft—was supposed to strike the victim dead. In creating the critical ISI capital furniture, only a few and select members of Kamuzu’s ‘Malawian community’ were required. Kamuzu’s spearhead policies—never mind the Goebbels tactics—were very specific: 'the majority mitu bhi-i-i! should be kept in the countryside.

ISI was colonialism again. But for a bit of ‘thangata’ here and there, the British colonial system had really not had much else to do with Malawian villagers. Neither was Kamuzu’s Capitalist model. It was about and for the urban Malawians. It was at best anti-people, at worst un-people. In the processes it took away opportunities for ‘real Malawians’ to fully participate in processes of national development.

Otherwise, how do you explain away: the Special Crops Act 1972 or the 'total punishment of rural Malawi' through the logic that removed Asian traders from rural Malawi in 1972? Was it not to deny the rural poor easy access to goods and services? The subsequent rural urbanization excuses called ‘National Rural Development Program [NRDP], launched in 1981, and its sister Rural Growth Centers [RGCs] Program, launched in 1984, were part admissions of failure—or is it guilt—about ISI!

In the cities, Kamuzu favored his so called ‘emerging middle class’ to realize his funnel-and-bottleneck ‘take off/ catch up’ policies. You and I—especially you and I who made it to Kamuzu’s University campuses—became his ‘pampered’ emerging middle class. We were Kamuzu’s ISI canon-fodder. We all internalized his ISI language. To this day it oozes out of our ears.

Just go back to the diagram above and speak aloud the terms in there. What is 'subsistence', 'traditional', 'rural', 'urban', 'dormitory towns', 'satellite towns', 'self-sufficiency', 'inputs' etc? These terms—some pretty meaningless [and colonial too] and some coined very recently too—are pretty innocuous. Yet they are part of our everyday vocabulary—so familiar they have no alternative meanings. Trully speaking they have some sort of meaning... Oh! Watch my subsequent blogs when I will unpack these. Meantime, are you not Kamuzu’s ‘middle class’ henchman against the Malawian rural and poor? How many times do you use the terms and concepts as your streetwise speak and proxies for national development policies. Would you like to abandon them and look stupid to your neighbors—at worst lose your job and all the ISI benefits Kamuzu bestowed on you? You dare not!

Henchmen and tools for Kamuzu? Remember, Kamuzu did not single handedly design and implement ISI policies. We were there and are still here—post 2007 and the MGDS—when we were supposed to abandon ISI. We are still championing these ‘useless’ terminology policies—dividing our society into rural and urban, rich and poor; even though, by comparison, what we consider ‘rich’ doesn’t even begin to shake the Richter scales of wealth elsewhere.

Makes you wonder: is life absolute or relative?

While we feverishly work to sort out the "comments' problem, please feel free to contact the author at zivaiclaude@gmail.com

I dreamt I was the National Minister of Marketing

It is one of those grey-with-colorful-edgings dreams. Just imagine I am now the national Minister of Marketing and my YAMBA team and I are flying out of LaGuardia: a signed agreement—with an African-American consortium—under our belt. The Americans will be taking a good chunk of the pork products a bunch of gung-ho YAMBAs and I are producing in Malawi—under an ‘expedited piggery and pork production’ strategy. That is after I pitched the Chinese—following their premier’s visit to England and proposing—in exchange of China building a high-speed train—that England sell pork to the nearly two-billion Chinese market. Incensed—we then lobbied the State President to tell the Chinese where their loyalties ought to lie; arguing—rightly or wrongly:
‘What are the chances the English would raise 32 million pigs, year on year to meet the Chinese market needs? We have the land space and youthful labor to do just that!’
Eventually, the Chinese conceded before backtracking. They had left us with a million live pigs and hefty bank loans. But not to be deterred we had found alternative markets—including the African-Americans. At 25 kilograms—pork and products—per person per year that is some pork market and we love it! Then last week they called us demanding more of our succulent pork. Hence this top-up deal in our briefcase. It will push our production to nearly 5 million beasts per year—real billions of American dollars for Malawi! Who cares about tobacco-smoking bans anymore? While we are at it, why not turn all tobacco estates into pig farms! But I am running ahead of myself.
Between the Chinese tail-twister and the first African-American deal, I had blogged about an ideal National Marketing Model for Malawi. That model led us into quite a few money-spinning ideas and caused the guys on the Hill to come up with the whole idea of a Minister of National Marketing—
Damn it’s just a dream and suddenly I am awakened by noises outside my tin shack. Despite the idea being as old as nationhood, there is no National Marketing Ministry in Malawi. Of course the Japanese have their MITI [something to do with International Trade and Information]. The MITI guys go around the world selling Japan, Toyotas and what have you. They are good at it too because no one—including the WTO—has raised a cry about it. So why doesn’t Malawi do such a thing? Between the Japanese and ourselves Malawi—more than them—needs MITI—Malawi International Trade and Marketing Intelligence to at least inform some of these global people where Malawi is located on the map. We are an independent state—not a province of South Africa!
But, we seem quite happy operating on chance. I have just seen an article on the creation of a MITI like Malawi Trade and Investment Center [MTIC]—that will help to “promote Malawi exports to international markets”. That is a good start but it is not a Ministry. We have to go one better and move away from the marketing saying: because we produce some quality and aromaful tobacco, tea, coffee and chilies then customers must smell where we are. In this new brave, ugly world we need more than a center. We need Export Development Corporations with Marketing Process Teams out there ‘brown papering’ current situations with our various products and commodities.
We have to determine: who knows about our products, who wants them, at what levels of quality, quantity and seasonality, in what packaging and price, what substitutes exists against our products and how do we counteract attempts to out-market us? And the list is endless because just knowing what we don’t know is not enough.
The next step is to design a response strategy—asking those farmers’ groups to organize around what we know—instead of encouraging poor farmers to rear bees before we even know who wants our honey. Imagine the mess that is localized exportation—‘kondowole’ everywhere but not even a packet of the stuff in my own PTC!
Downstream production should only occur after defining a new marketing channel. That is what is called ‘pull’ marketing and it’s efficient because you don’t cause our village mothers to grow tomato, sit on the road side for days to get to markets. Meantime who—during this enforced absence—tends for the crop of tomato she leaves in the field? It is our poor knowledge of marketing and the duplicity of our marketing messages to blame for the resultant low and illusive national productivity.
If we want development then we should be developing new distribution channels for our commodities—not glorified export information centers. Vietnam came out of a war with the Americans and yet it is Vietnam—not Brazil, not Uganda, not Malawi—who is now the exclusive coffee supplier to the Americans! And it is Vietnam—not America—who fashioned the most efficient just-in-time [JIT] coffee distribution system—shipping, warehouses, trucking and you name it—in the USA and sold it to their customer as a conquer-all solution across the USA. Now, Maxwell House Coffee only has to cough and the Viets are already on his doorstep. Meantime, who but disinterested white middlemen—are responsible for Malawi commodities at docksides in Southampton? Indeed, why go to Southampton when the JIT logistics nerve-center for England is somewhere around Felixstowe and the Dutch ports across the English Channel?
Meantime, back at home we wonder about lack of lucrative commodity deals and disappearing forex.

While we feverishly work to sort out the "comments' problem, please feel free to contact the author at zivaiclaude@gmail.com