The Difference Between White Elephants and Black Elephants in African Politics

The first time I saw a real elephant was at Kasungu Game Reserve and I must say—after the folklore stories I had heard before that—I was the least amazed at the rather lack of comparable bulk and height of the beast. Until then, I had walked around with a Jurassic Park imagine of an elephant. The untowering beast was hardly a wonder story. Hence, it took the white man, in my company [he was the first to see it], some doing just to isolate the animal from the shrubbery background and convince my incredulous eyesight that amidst the bushes lurked a breathing entity.

And when I did ocularize; the elephant’s appearance defied folklore. It was neither black nor white. It was greyer than I had imagined; probably because the beast had—for improved ventilation—stopped and wallowed at some mud pool! So are elephants off-black [because of dried loom mud] or off-white [because of physical discoloration]?

It is such language vexations that extend to political nomenclature and neo-colonial tongue-in-cheek deliberations of African economic failure. Are African leaders—besides Idi Amin who had fridge loads of human livers—gallery players turned on by ‘white elephants’?

By definition a political ‘white elephant’ is a project involving one form of construction or the other. African Presidents are known for ceremoniously emerging from their Stately Palaces to inaugurate and/ or commission this brand of elephants. African leaders will plaque their names to major highways, bridges, buildings etc. In themselves such constructions are not the point of the usual derogative ‘white elephant’ references. Rather it is the fact that, in more cases, the physical construction itself is either irrelevant and / or an expensive project whose economic value is likely to have passed long before the project was commissioned. Generally painted white and huge against the surrounding backdrop [shrubbery] these projects have been labeled ‘white elephants’.

So, in turn, what are ‘black elephants’? These must either be real or live elephants because some of those beasts can really be pot black! But it is quite rare to find a truly black elephant because—for reasons of Darwinian adaptation—they need to merge with the surrounding environment. Besides pitch darkness [which happens after daylight], black elephants would be real targets of sightful ‘poachers’; in the Game Parks. At worst, they will be targets for real predators within the natural survival hierarchy. So elephants have adapted—created the illusion or camouflage—through mud-smearing techniques in order to merge with the environment and freely forage without undue interference.

In political talk, black elephants are the illusion created by the people who stand behind the African politician. When you live in the private sector where managers’ power is nearly absolute it is easy to assume that the State President has the power to ‘command’ anything. But, anecdote increasingly has it otherwise. The truth is civil servants, including those around the State President, are so powerful that they decide everything that he does. Civil servants may subserviently bend an ear towards their politicians but it is just that. For public consumption. The civil service in any African country is a runaway bus; hell bound down a ravine of its choice; driver or no driver! The man who wrote the British TV series ‘Yes Minister’ had the grasp of the issues involved here.

Civil servants are the real black elephants. However, to fulfill their Darwinian supremacy—they need the shrubbery [the ‘illusory’ element]—behind which they can then freely operate. Therein is the twist. How does an animal serve both as the black elephant as well as the illusion?

I have yet to fully grasp Nicolo Machiavelli’s arguments. However, one lesson I have grasped from him is that in all his writings he fancied himself a ‘king maker’—never showing or seeking to become king himself.

There are vast rewards—once you have joined the ‘king maker tribe' [civil servants]—in capturing the elephant's and not ‘illusion's’ station in the scheme of things. The ability to see one’s vision translated into reality and the moral satisfaction that one can actually influence the pace and direction of history are some of the reasons why civil servants readily and sub-optimally exist in a low pay, low perk national job system.

Now, am I confusing you? Yes, the politician, not the king-maker tribe, is the illusion; The politician is the shrubbery behind which the elephant enjoys succor. Generally, ‘white elephants’ framed against forlorn backgrounds [at a cursory glance mud smeared elephants look more white than black] would be easy targets for poachers. Hence, they have in politics been points of study and derision! The poor state house fellow—seeking to have his name plaqued into historical obscurity—ends up being blamed for the ‘white elephants’ that dot the political landscape of his reign.

For instance, in Malawi we live under the illusion that Kamuzu created and/or introduced the Import Substitution Industrialization [ISI] model—with all its indefensible and dead-end consumerist practices. Granted Kamuzu mouthed these things and ISI and its related infrastructure became the negatively resilient reality we exist in today. But who actually had wished ISI onto Malawians?

The illusion is that this was Kamuzu’s baby through-and-through. It was him who had watched aspects of ‘catch up’ models tried out in the post-war Europe he lived until 1958. He became sold to these and when western ‘experts’ appeared at his State House, purveying ‘take off’ alternatives, he was an ‘already sold’ adherent. The rest—the white elephants [the Capital City at Lilongwe, the Import-driven Industrial sites at Makata and Kanengo etc] as they say—is history!

But how true is this? Twice Chipembere and friends had to ‘hunt’ across England for a reluctant Kamuzu. They nearly started a crisis at Chileka Airport, in early 1958, when Kamuzu performed a ‘disappearing act’: sorting out some marital mix ups in England. Malawian masses gathered at the airport threatened to storm the BOAC plane supposedly carrying Kamuzu; only to learn that Chipembere et al had misread Kamuzu’s promise to return home. Instead, Kamuzu had somehow unilaterally melted into the London under-system; deciding not to board the plane at the agreed date. Urged by these king-makers Kamuzu eventually showed up in July 1958!
The Chipemberes needed Kamuzu—to come and play the white elephant role—while they fulfilled their 'black elephant objectives. Yatuta Chisiza went into the bush because Kamuzu—the supposed 'white elephant'—suddenly showed un-scripted signs of a 'black elephant'.

Earlier, it was the same king makers that had agitated for the end of the Federation and political independence. In that order you can include John Chilembwe as one of the king makers. The story line is the same. At no point did any of these people find anything repugnant about the ‘import substitution’ system that colonialism had, since 1898, put in place. Indeed when, in 1955, Roy Welensky proposed an export-oriented alternative—the Bangula Dam and a fully fledged Federation—that would liberate rural Malawi [at least the Lower Shire would have been the richest part of Malawi today] the king makers rejected it. The Nyasaland African Congress wrote urging Kamuzu to do the same; and onto soap boxes in Trafalgar Square soap Kamuzu spent hours: denouncing the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland. Once back home, to Kanjedza and Gweru Prisons they all eagerly went in rejection of the genuine liberation of Malawians. Am I defencing colonialism here? No! The facts though are making my case.
Colonialism, Federation and post-independence Malawi have one common thread. None wanted anything to do with a model that would genuinely empower the Malawian poor. Since colonialism—save for a white district commissioner located in a rural part of the colonial extraction enclave practicing 'thangata' as a weekend sport—the development model in Malawi has pointedly ignored rural Malawi from its accumulation value chain.

If you doubt my argument think through this: what was the main gist of the fight for political independence in Malawi? Simple... It was about the African majority earning the ‘right to shop at Kandodo’: through the front door. Rub shoulders with the whites! The African majority were resisting being asked to shopping through a side window. Yet, how many of these ‘we-want-to-shop–at-Kandodo’ Africans were truly from the countryside? Who in rural Malawi had the economic means to seek out a packet of Rhodesian sausages from the paraffin fridge in Kandodo’s Butchery section let alone push out a trolley-ful of monthly groceries?

It was the rich African middle class—including the upward mobile youth in Zomba; on the day Kamuzu dared to jump—butt naked into the ‘whites only’ swimming pool at Bishop Mackenzie in Zomba. It was the young turks and ambitious men of Zomba who stood across the stream, at now Lwangwa Parish, and cheered as Kamuzu's black Humber arrived from his Limbe Surgery! Of course, Kamuzu had no legs to show off in public—he didn't jump into the 'whites only' pool. These were mere shenanigans aimed at ‘capturing’ the colonial value chain. Meanwhile, there never was intent to replace this value chain with anything that would involve such unpalatable alternatives as allowing dirty villagers to also butt dive into Bishop Mackenzie swimming pool. Ye-c-h-h-h!

Typically, Kamuzu—the 'white elephant'—was allowed and went about putting his name on all plaques thrown at him—Kamuzu Highway, Kamuzu Procession Road, Kamuzu Stadium, Kamuzu Bridge, Kamuzu International Airport, Kamuzu this, Kamuzu that! 'Zonse Zimene!' They coined the song and he lapped it! Meantime, beneath him, we [the black elephants] got our ISI model. We had achieved our free foraging rights!

In his personal biography [circa 1997] Chipembere is emphatic we egged Kamuzu into the ogre he became. As long as we convinced ourselves Kamuzu was ‘too foreign’ to understand our personal agendas we connived to use his over-bearing physical presence to deliver what we had failed to wrest from the Nyasaland Legislature and the Federation Assembly in Salisbury. And whenever the illusion would 'wash off' we would rush back to the mud pools for another mud bath or is it 'whitewash'. So when Kamuzu threatened to leave [the mud threatening to wash off] unless we guaranteed him free reign, we made him ‘life President’—a 'white elephant in perpetuity' while ensuring we did not lose sight of our objective.
Keep the rural poor subjugated!

When, for selfish reasons, Asians sought to liberate rural Malawi through provision of cheap and easy access to goods and services, the civil servants moved in to stop such a 'nefarious' intent. It would release ‘captive’ rural Malawi from our king maker clutch. We made it possible—Kamuzu only stood up to announce the policy—to relocate Asians into urban Malawi where we would keenly spy on their ‘unbridled economic tendencies' on the back of poor Malawians.
Am I twisting history here? No—facts speak for themselves. Who among the rural poor and/or us, the so called 'urban rich' [the other day someone finally told me that it is foolhardy to think rural or want to retire to the countryside] , had the means or know-wish to run even a basic ’Tea Room’ in those premises left behind by the Asians? None. But, we cheated Kamuzu that we would do it. Way back in 1978, Mlia [Urban Geography of Malawi] was already talking of a new phenomenon  called ‘ghost towns’. Are they gone yet? Those were [and still are] black elephant creations—Kamuzu merely white elephanted them.

But why? The answer lies in how—years after Kamuzu’s demise—our blood tends to curdle everytime the possibility of Asian returning into Songani, Malosa, Thyolo No. 1 and/or Lilongwe New City Center is mentioned. As average Malawians—fully aware that we will never make Tengani, in Nsanje, the vibrate towns it was during the aMwenye time—we simply cannot countenance that thought. Not because of the 'Asian' factor [Those are gone. There are very few 'shop attendant' Asians left to want to do that kind of thing].
It is us. We are ready to ensure those places remain bushes—our rural brothers and sisters remain in oblivion in order to safeguard the one precious thing in our lives. To develop rural Malawi would amount to liberating the rural kindred. Unfortunately, in so doing, it would also remove the one precious reference point in our success story. You see in Malawi we measure wealth—'richness'—through comparisons: I am rich because he is poor or if he is poor it is because I am better than him; therefore I am rich. Thus, if the poor were to be removed or uplifted from their current poverty stations, then our wealth comparison would be hard to apply!

It has become instinctive. It influences every decision black elephants make. Indeed, long before Bingu came onto the scene, we had designed 'Operation Dongosolo'. We merely waited for the right moment to attach the ‘negative white elephant’ bit to his name. As part of the usual 'externalization' process that goes with such actions—the white mud on the elephant may never become part of the black elephant—word is sent out: 'to oppose Operational Dongosolo is to oppose Bingu'! Surprisingly, it is the blood temperature of the Malawian ‘middle class’ that rose in decibels when mention of vendors returning to the streets was recently made. Clearly, it is not State House that doesn’t want those vendors on the streets. It‘s us, the black elephants, who hate the sight of the poor achieving something for themselves right before our eyes. Such an eventuality would rub off the dividing sheen between their 'poverty' and our 'richness'!
Meantime—and here is the unexplainable double standard—we secretly 'shop goods and services' from the same poor whenever they appear outside our office windows [too rushed to go to the crowded markets where we have 'crowded' them]! We travel into the countryside to collect food parcels etc from our poor kinsmen because it is the most natural and convenient thing to do; all the time lying aloud about how when we were at Chancellor College we internalized Schumpeter's—‘small is beautiful’ [nothing succeeds best than small]. In this Import Substitution economy—responsible for the disappearing forex and fuel shortages and foreign direct investment taking forever coming—who ought to be our small and beautiful? Isn't it the vendor that we are persecuting day in day out? Granted, once there was some unwarranted thieving and harrassment on our street pavements, but was that good reason for resourceful people to throw out the baby with the water?

Here is another example of black elephant role in messing up and the reasons why we cannot lock up the vendor genie in the countryside. It was the king makers—not Kamuzu—who studied German rural growth models. King makers are currently ill studying Japanese and Chinese alternative models to Capitalism. These await the next 'white elephant' to inaugurate. But, back to rural growth centers—king makers developed the rural growth concept [wrongly too] before inviting Kamuzu out of Sanjika to put a name to a plaque. Thereafter, we ‘shoveled’ him right back into his Stately ‘prison’! The short of it [because the black elephant knows best] is that it is the elephant that picks and choose the camouflage it needs to sustain its own Darwinist agendas.

Because this is an analysis of African politics let me add an internationalist example. For all the arguments posited, it is increasingly clear that 'micro-managing' Robert Mugabe has never been in control in Zimbabw. All his political [white elephant] antics are actually the makings of the king-makers around him. The other white elephants around him have known all along. Hence, the bitter political tears that were shed when the mulilated and burned body of General Solomon Mujuru [Rex Nhongo]—a king maker—turned coat against fellow king makers—was found. White elephants are always aware of the dangerous machinations of the black elephants around them. Ticks and mud on the body of an elephant know when to flake off to safety. Meantime, these too are involved in the fight for juicy positions on the ['white' or 'black'?] elephant’s body. Yet, another confusing illusion we must contend with.

I wonder if Machiavelli understood who actually decides that a pretender politician—threatening the agenda of reigning king makers—should be hanged. Who decides—just to warn others [white or black?]—that the slain politicians body should be dragged into the center of town and left there as food for dogs and buzzards?

The author can also be contacted on zivaiclaude@gmail.com

When It does Not Pay To Chop Up Things

Some time back—1995 to be specific: while enjoying the exile days into which some of Kamuzu’s boys had conveniently dispatched me—a South African transport company head-hunted me as Project Manager for their “‘seamless’ services” project between Cape Town and Johannesburg, later extended to Durban and then briefly to Franscistown and Bulawayo [just to get the 56 Humber cars some genius in Lusaka had imported]. This is not the space to argue the ulterior motive of the South African rail management for taking on a black man at that specific time of South African economic-politics.

Briefly though, what happened is that on 15 January 1995 [doubters check Spoornet records] I reported for duties and the Afrikanner Executive Manager and his Rail Services Managers [mouthful titles that didn’t fit on an average business card!] took me through the paces. These were a sort of my verbal terms of reference. Thereafter, they booked me on an afternoon flight to Cape Town:

‘Just go and have a look and see…’ was their specific words. Judging by their tone, it was clear they had not bought into what the employment agency had told them: that I was a qualified and seasoned business-process re-engineering consultant. That would be impossible! But more importantly, as judging by the camaraderie manner they put a hand over shoulders, I understood why, back in 1965, someone in Zambia had coined the term ‘window dressing’.

Indeed, I flew to Cape Town [I wont tell you what the white air hostess did with my lunch]. But my job had started in earnest. And, of course, as is my nature, I just didn’t ‘have a look and see’. I am a consultant—derogatively called ‘business undertakers’ in the trade. Thus, I can smell a ‘dead’ business concern from miles away! Soon—using a mental business analysis methodology—I discovered why the ‘seamless’ service was progressively failing. At that point, even the stop gap solution, in the form of the ‘Wits Blitz’ [white bullet] train [for reasons soon to become obvious], had proved unworkable.

A few strategically placed questions during rare tea with business managers in Cape Town and City Deep revealed why the South African rail system needed redevelopment. I established where I could actually twig the system and get the whole thing working again! Needless to say that did very little to enamor me with my ‘new’ boss—the Rail Services Manager—on the eleventh floor of Mdjadji House.

As complicated as it appeared, it was a simple problem really. It goes like this: ‘When you force theory on practice sooner or later problems will invariably crop up in the least expected places’. I don’t know who coined that sense, so don’t ask me. But we have had that problem, here in Malawi, since 1964. Medical-doctors-turned-politicians dismally endevoring to perform economic surgeries on whole nations!

You see, in the years leading to 1994—when South Africa eventually attained political independence—most Apartheid state companies were quickly ‘restructured’. The argument was that they should become ‘new-political-dispensation’ friendly. Thus, most were ‘privatized’ altogether. Of course, post 1995, African and a few white apologists/ analysts would provide fuller explanation as to why it had to be done this way. They argued while opting for ‘commercialization’ instead: ‘privatization’ had been an Afrikanner ruse to ring-fence profitable state corporations so that the incoming African leadership and its potential ‘thieving’ cronies would not reach them! That is: what would have become ‘private’ and operating ‘profitably’ would not, as per ANC manifesto-requirements, be ‘nationalized’.

Naturally, hours were spent training managers—mostly Afrikanner—on how to efficiently run such ‘private’ organizations. The trick concept/terminology of the day was ‘Strategic Business Unit [SBU]. Like an aroma-ful coffee, SBUs and ‘decentralization’ concepts filled the ‘mainly white’ corporate air of South Africa. And just like trade winds, concepts, terms and fads have a tendency to waft towards other unaffected regions. That is why, years later, decentralization would be the catch-all term in democratically-minded Malawians. As its aroma fades, decentralization has also become good reason for inaction among a few civil servants in Malawi!

Back then in RSA, management consultants were doing roaring business: chopping up big state companies, introducing ‘corporatist management systems’, the whole shebang! But, even a streetkid economist could see through it. How do you—given Apartheid had finally collapsed because it had spent itself to the ground: fighting the ‘revolutionary wars’ around it—decentralize, that is blow up the size and management costs of your system, when your ‘revenues’ are going down? It is best described as an economic monostrocity of thought! But as usual politics has the knack to find some economic sense to explain the opposite and true reality on the ground! But it always does not go according to plan. Sometimes the humus gets to hit the fan!

Hence, ‘Seamless Service’ was an act of desperation: a product of a ‘decentralization’ policy gone awry. Naturally, where the rationalization [undertaker’] type of consultants had made a killing chopping up state organizations, it became our turn—the developmentalist [‘the exhumers’]—to try and put back the organization ethos within the dismembered units! Even black blocks like me were suddenly in kutapa kutaya demand. But, remember life is a mess. That is how people made money out of the man-made ‘Millenium bug’ story!

Prior to 1990, the Afrikaneer South African Transport Services [SATS] had been an ‘efficient logistics system’. This is because, as a centralized and unitary transportation system, it had efficiently and effectively operated along the logical national value chain. It had been involved in extraction of raw materials, processing them and putting them into the global markets. In return for production inputs—to ensure the looped system functioned like clockwork—it had brought in goods and services. Through SATS Apartheid had survived and thrived! Then, the value chain had had no ‘seams’ and/ or artificial breaks.

But in 1990 [the anti-Apartheid writing was on the wall] Transnet—the replacement system to SATS—became necessary; premised on the SBU approach. This now meant seams everywhere. Back in the days when Malawian youth read novels James Hardley Chase wrote: ‘safety is in numbers’. The Afrikanners reintepreted this as: ‘confusion is in numbers’ [in decentralization]. They created separate Extraction logistics—mine conveyor systems and pipelines—Viamax. A Roadnet was also created separately from rail system—Spoornet. Irrespective that the rail rain into Ports—Portnet was weaned away. The national shipping line—Safmarine—conveniently gravitated into the Lloyds shipping fraternity. There even came a time, when ‘business excellency’ madness reaches its worst diagnozed levels, that each unit was ordered to compete and cannibalize traffics from the other!

Thus—just as daylight must follow darkness—SBU managers soon religiously implemented what they had been taught: ‘make sure systems within one’s ‘silo’ were robust and securely protected against ‘competition’ outside one’s operational territory’. After all their salaries now relied on how effectively each SBU reported performance results within such a ‘privatized’ ethos.

The best example was in the Spoornet system where I was eventually thrust; with specific intentions that I fail. Here the SBU concept allocated a specific number of shunter trains to each SBU manager. He was expected—at the end of the month—to explain how efficiently he had used each shunter horse. Otherwise he would forfeit his shunters and rolling stock to better keyed SBU Managers!

So, on the Cape Town-Johannesburg corridor—once a single business unit—ten SBUs suddenly surfaced; spoils were shared. Thus, a train from Cape Town—operated by the Cape Town SBU—would dump its cargo at De Aar; some 100 or so kilometers up the corridor to Johannesburg. Job well done and on time! The De Aar SBU would pick up this cargo and dump it up the corridor, through Bloomfontein and onwards until it reached Kazerne and/ or City Deep in Johannesburg! Soon—because this is a relay actions and that’s probably why I have never been excited with ‘Relay Races’ in trackfield contest—a train that had taken 56 hours to operate, end to end, now took 144 hours! Do your sums: a whole 88 hours had been inefficiently built into the system! The English cliché is: time is money, therefore imagine the cost implications. When the Wits Blitz was introduced into this fray the SBU managers conspired—a matter of a child you taught witchcraft rebelling against your authority—by cutting up the train and hiding the ‘white’ locomotives and rolling stock up disused rail sidings while Wits Blitz electrical units and consummables mysteriously disappeared! In Durban even junior managers promoted themselves into SBU managers, started their own thing and pushed trains into Kings marshalling Yard that were not on the computerized manifests. So the problem back-roomed into the port itself. If trains are not leaving the marshalling yard then fresh ones can’t enter and therefore ships can’t be loaded and/ or off loaded. Not to be undone, the Durban City Council launched a new tourist attraction: ‘Come spot tens of aimlessly ships floating in our harbor!’

Meantime, every SBU reported in improved performance results—and these tended to get better the longer the cargo stayed in line. Overtime, extra shifts etc [signs of a growing economy] became the order of the day. Real money [not accounting or monopoly money as we consultants call the silly accounting systems in many public organization] exchanged hands at these ends of the system!

But, the real victim in this revised value chain was the cargo-shipping customers. And they reacted accordingly. Soon more road trains were operating between Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. The South Africa train across the Limpopo was an early victim and so Malawian containers at Dabuka in Zimbabwe were all in ‘overstay’ category. The trucking industry in Malawi was suddenly in high demand taking high value cargo by road to Durban. Of course, they needed ‘tip’ money in order to promptly off load once in ‘bottleneck’ Durban. In fact, it is in these circumstance that one of Transnet’s own SBU—a road freight corporation—became an instant success story. An unfortunate vicious circle of success had been born!

It is in this environment that I made it my task to destroy this vicious circle—fight decentralization. Naturally it did not enamor me with a few people in both camps—the white SBU Managers and the ‘xenophobic’ African Managers who could not believe that ‘someone from Africa’ [according to them South Africans is part of Europe that happened to be accidently attached to the southern tip of Africa] could achieve such a feat! For causing such embarassment I am back ‘in Africa’, ain’t I?

But the South Africa account is not the moral of this story. I use it merely to demonstrate something that we, here in Africa, could be doing wrongly and for all the good reasons. For example, ‘decentralization’—and mark me I don’t hate genuine decentralization—is the raging development concept in Malawi today. Indeed, city governments are currently at a standstill because every officer in there argues: ‘decentralization has flopped’ and ‘without local councilors it is difficult for them to make any decisions’. There I have told you why our cities are on a backward winding spiral to decay.

Of course, a recent Nigeria delegation to Malawi left us with three pieces of gem-like advice. One: you seem to be on the right track in terms of approaches to town planning and urbanization. Which raises questions as to what kind of mess Abuja is in? Two: whatever you do, don’t discover oil until Malawi has become politically mature. Ugh? Three: we have lived under so many military regimes and as civil servants we realized waiting for genuine local councilors could be long coming. So we have conscientiously gone ahead and introduced change; convinced the councilors—when they do arrive—would retrospectively ratify those decisions. After all isn’t that what councilors do [retrospectively ratify prior or subsequent decisions made by technicians]; whether they are physically or democractically around or not?

Indeed, the government-NGO impasse in Malawi today includes a demand that local government elections have been repeatedly postponed. And the NGOs are right. Structural Adjustment, Multiparty democracy and Millenium Development Goals are all about pro-poor development objectives. Expectedly, the three are predicated on the successful implementation of a decentralized decision making system. Centralization, less confusion equals less attention to the needs of the greater majority: the poor. Briefly stop here though and chew through that: who really are the greater majority in decentralization? The poor or the beneficiaries of decentralization who may not be poor after all? Meantime—if you follow the standard logic to its conclusion—a government that resists decentralization must surely be against the poor and thus anti-democratic!

So much for the idealism but note the double talk in the NGO recent demands for change. They also want more forex and an end to fuel shortages. In other words, NGOs are no more different from the Apartheid leadership of the 1990s—faced with a sinking ship—picked on an economic concept to explain away the impossible. Decentralization is a chimera [a fad really] of the highest proportion. Of course,  everyone would love it if this was possible and there are experts somewhere who will argue so—that democracy and wealth can be possibly achieved at the same time.

But it requires a magician’s portion to explain how they would work the formula below:

P = R-C [P is equals R minus C]

Where:

’P’       is profit

‘R’       is revenue

‘C’       cost

Profit—and thus overall shareholder happiness—is possible when your revenue is going up and/ or your costs are coming down. The reverse is true; especially when your costs are outrunning your revenue. Generally democracy [shareholder happiness and freedom] are highest as revenues are rising. Naturally, to achieve this you need strict control on costs [centralization]; especially if your revenue is not ‘tracking’ properly.

There are several things you can do; particularly if your export-capability is next to negligible. Get the donors in to supplant your revenues. Generally get them in to fund the discretionary cost elements. Governments have tended to include ‘pro-poor’ projects within the ‘discretionary’ category: a thing NGOs don’t particularly like. In fact, it is just such kind of government behavior or carelessness to their elected duties that eventually made NGOs a reality. The collorary is: if government were to pay more attention to ‘pro-poor’ activities then NGOs would become redundant. The corporate observation goes like this: ‘A people-sensitive manager keeps the Unions away!’

There you are: NGOs are unions doing their rightful thing. By the way: do you know that Tsvangirayi is a product of the fake unionism that Mugabe created in 1980 just to head off genuine unions in Zimbabwe? In Chichewa the Tsvangirayi-Mugabe saga is called ‘kulumidwa ndichokumba’ [bitten by what one was digging out for lunch!]. Of course, every corporate board member will tell you a ‘crowd-pleasing’ manager reports low shareholder value. Naturally, if the board doesn’t get him, sooner or later the shareholders or the poor [democratic happiness] will get him!

On the other hand, if you are an ‘economist’ you are likely to see decentralization [local government elections included] as adding up operating costs; never mind the wasteful laxity that comes with councilors’ salaries and perks for jobs not done! One cannot see any profit—shareholder happiness—at the end of that silver lining. This is especially when donors are prapared to enthusiatically meet initial democratic costs and not the recurrent costs related to such endeavors. That’s the problem with these internationalist civil servants—the UN included—starting up costs, causing others to ‘run’ their petty projects only to dump the baby on the doorstep of poor African governments! They have a funny way of counting what they give you. It’s like that saga where private sector auditors found billions missing at a state institution but when government auditors went in they actually found that the staff had been putting in their own money to help the institution survive from ‘hand to mouth’. That’s your donors telling everyone what they give you when they actually are taking out!

Unbeknown to these internationalists and their unionist cronies—critics of the Washington Consensus agree—these people are actually busy chopping up things that would be better managed as unitary systems; at least at the present stages of economic development. You do not decentralize at a point when every scarce national development resource is required to put a shoulder to processes of ‘national economic take off’. It does not make sense, does it?, to take forex intended for critical raw material inputs to buy fuel just so politicians and NGOs can run around the country celebrating democracy on and for the empty stomachs of the poor out there! Every serious mother will tell you it is not ‘cake time’ when the ufa pantry is running low! You don’t chop up the household budget at such trying times. But not your average donor. They appear to reason that we need to occasionally ‘let down our hair’—burp out some of the hunger gases welling up in our bellies! And don’t tempt their ‘long memories’ calling them ‘Neocolonialists’!

Anyway, a closer look at the ISI diagram above—I also discussed it in an earlier blog: ‘Pictures and Words in Practical Economics’—will show you where the ‘seams’ have been deliberately introduced into our national system. If we are not democratically decentralized then we have been economically and policy decentralized since 1964. Can you imagine the astronomical cost such ‘seam’ impose on making and managing economic process in Malawi?

How much more do we pay when we indulge in such policy ‘relay races’ every time we seek to make a decision and/or scream that someone is ‘trampling onto our decision territory’. Meanwhile, monopoly money is being counted everyday. People are being patted on the back and promoted for good decisions made within wrong decision making frameworks. Real money exchanges hands too! And as my boss—sometime back when I worked in Malawi’s private sector—would say: zazungu sakangana nazo [what a white man designed is not for a black man to contest]. It’s all confusing; while the real people, down there, suffer!

By the way what was I saying?

The author can also be contacted on zivaiclaude@gmail.com