I wrote the ‘Gander is the way’ blog way back in 2004—long before I had ever heard of blogging and while local news editors played marble with critical decisions—I also wrote this article: here it goes
Imagine my sense of awe when I learned some American film star garners over US$100 million in one film appearance! Later I learned that certain low budget films—shot at under US$30,000—had made it to Cannes and managed to beat some mega million-dollar films at Emmy Awards!
How do they do it?
I have since thought of these stark contrasts in terms of the comparable cost of transforming our national development system. A question in a similar vein would be: How do we create a US$30, 000 NIC [National Irrigation Corporation] while avoiding the US$100 billion price tag that so called ‘experts’ generally bandy around? And I've been checking things too.
The Cannes film case shows that it is not the expensiveness of the means—i.e. paying some high class actor—that really matters. That is a cost that must be slated against potential revenue. Rather it is the final message: the results—the potential revenue—that is crucial. Will be movie be able to describe a beeline that viewers will follow? Big ticket films have flopped while low budgets have become financial success stories!
If such arguments—movie goers coming out for the message whether it is Tom Cruise or my poor uncle Ma'mwene who is the main actors—that must invariably work if we transferred the logic to other scenarios. Once you grasp this fine relationship correctly it becomes easy to understand why India—and not the obvious China—is now being tagged the next global superpower! And this Indian reputation has nothing to do with Indian prowess in the bedroom—i.e. comparing 1.8 billion Indians to 1.3 billion Chinese by 2030. That is a contributing factor but it is not THE factor.
Rather the Indians have figured—‘brain powered’—a cheaper way of getting ahead in a world where development "tradeoffs" and clever competence options are getting scarcer and scarcer. Did you get that right the first time around? Let me break it down into your size-bite: ‘In the Fashion Industry ‘Life is the Life’. It is the driver of fashion changes—fads and stayers alike. In fact, there is only one basic fashion in life—getting dressed! Yet, the clever ones have found ways of combining ‘acts of getting dressed’ into various permutation; coming up with new approaches to fashion and generally the cheaper the solution the bigger the ‘wow’ factor and thus the greater the money bank drawer factor! And ‘Life Goes On’! So what is the ‘cheap getting-dressed-fashion’ of Malawi’s national economic development priorities? So, people are running around digging holes all over the place looking for minerals. This is because we are so lazy to ‘brain power’ the cheaper approaches.
For example—because they have too many mouths to feed and no easy money to hand around—the Indians dig cheap water canals to trap water from the Himalayas and the Ganges River. Given Malawi have no geographical accidents like copper mines—e.g. some of our neighbors are luckier—it is expected that Malawi must quest for the cheapest and/ or lowest-input development strategies. Malawi cannot escape the Indian Conundrum Approach.
Yet check what we have been doing since 1947. Just because Kamuzu grew up in the USA and during the Roosevelt Great Depression and the subsequent New Deal era—that involved building roads across the USA as a Keynesian ‘supply-side’ stimulus to growth—Malawi has become victim of such economic misunderstanding. The ‘new-deal’ USA needed roads because it was already economically developed ‘stupid’! Even then Roosevelt invested in an expensive canal construction and irrigation program as part of that New Deal. What did we get as our political independence ‘New Deal’? Petty road programs leading to villages that were renamed ‘Capital City’ [new towns development programs]—all the stuff rich countries do for ‘dessert’; not for the main meal. Have we learned or changed much since Kamuzu?
In other words, no matter how politically expedient and given a finite bucket of NDR [national development resources]—Malawi does not need elaborate road networks at this stage. Opening up the Mid West and the Western seaboard of the USA was one slog with little investment in roads and logistics as a precondition. The USA grew rich on the basis of ‘mipita’ [rat tracks] for roads and the ‘pioneering’ spirit of its Capitalists. In short, Malawi cannot afford to build roads and irrigation canals at the same time. We have to make pragmatic choices and—as I said in the Gander blog—those choices are hard because our international partners are generally against them. They have to because they are using the New Deal Roosevelt model to develop a village like Malawi—and that is wrong development principles. As I have said elsewhere: ‘even Margaret Thatcher would have had a tough time transforming Malawi’. This is because the challenges are different. We start from the lower end of the development template. Put simply not every successful CEO of a business in Malawi or elsewhere can ‘start up and run a business’. Peddling a bicycle that is already mobile and balancing pushing one into mobility are two different things and we pretend not to know! Our international partners are generally dense and I won’t say anti-African but the facts are there:
Ever wondered why the World Bank [see Cernea in 2002] was funding irrigation schemes in Thailand and other Asian countries but downrightly refused irrigation loans to Africa and Malawi included? Check the pocket change they are still proposing to support irrigation initiatives today. They did do that elsewhere and why?
What is the choice then; if we are to go the ‘own-bootstraps’ route?
Given roads—ceteres paribus—are notoriously inefficient in creating food production opportunities. And given economic theory argues transport and communications are means to "scarcity surmounting" [bridge the distance between sources of plenty and points of deficiency] then scarcity is largely a production shortfall in one locality. Meantime, availability of "commodities" to be exchanged must precede such need for exchange processes otherwise two points of deficiency that are properly logistic-ed will hardly have anything to exchange. Therefore, it follows that hard-earned taxpayers’ money should first go to cheap irrigation canals in order to ensure availability of "exchangeable commodities"!
Do we use Nyerere's Ujamaa principles to get the irrigation canals dug; given digging trenches takes muscles and that may come pretty cheap around here? But, I believe we have no intention to use slave or any other forms of conscripted labor? Bakili saw to that and created MASAF. The only problem it has never been truly not available to the poor it was intended. However, choices are there—after all Capitalist is the harnessing of idle surplus capacity [i.e. slave surplus in different degrees of exploitable disposition]. If the Chinese are refusing to sign the WTO agreement is because they discovered ‘enslaving’ foreign [Western] patents for free is their route to growth and glory. We, poor Malawians, signed on the dotted line without understanding the ‘thieving principles’ involved and who is worse off then?!
Instead, to brain power a bit, we will employ one of my development principles. It is called "Cascading". You know the stuff your parents used to do? They would force you into your older brother or sister’s worn-out clothes just to make sure household funding goes a little bit further. Economic Cascading recognizes that out there lies so much idle "advanced"—by Malawian development standards—technology and most of our "kick-start" development solutions. Our State Presidents—instead of going on foreign tours looking for Sushi dinners—should seriously spend more time in "foreign scrap yards! Forget the rubbish the earlier leaders used to say: "Ku Malawi sikudzala". Did you ever utter "sindine padzala" when your mother brought the toeless shoes your older brother was abandoning? In fact if you know your history Stalin Russia built its car manufacturing industry by "carting away" a whole BMW factory out of defeated Germany! The economic cascading I am proposing would involve merely doing the reverse in a smarter way.
"Cascading" is a ‘science’ of consciously gathering useable technology lying idle in the advanced systems. Half the time those systems don't need the stuff. It is a bother to them because in those parts of the world "scrap" can be quite expensive to dispose. Besides in this day and age of Globalization we need such national business development and marketing strategies. So if Malawi should become "kudzala" so be it. Let's get the Americans to give us some of the back actors and trench digging machinery that Norman Swartzkorf and others used to dig trenches in Kuwait during George Bush Senior's unfinished war and in Iraq during George Bush Junior's "Round Two with Saddam". In this case we get the cascade for nearly nothing as an investment on our part.
So let's together draft a note:
"Please, Sirs in the USA [in fact with Obama in it ought to be much simpler] can you kindly let us have some of your war-surplus back actors and other things to accelerate our national irrigation program. Naturally this will enable us to raise our national productivity and if your cows ever need any surplus maize we will gladly supply it at a reasonable price..."
An efficient back actor—digging through the largely spongy soils of Malawi—should give us at least 1000 to 2000 meters of meter-deep trenches a day. So, hundred back actors will manage 20 kilometers of trench work per day. That is a lot of trenches by the end of 365 days! By the way back actors have front plough hoes that can also be used to restart Kamuzu’s gravel quality DRIMP roads throughout Malawi.
The Americans should also add a few good levelers to be used to scour and cover up a few bad patches in the field creating reasonably level planting fields. The rest of the job the idle Malawian smallholder—in the field for three months and drinking kachasu and uchema for the other nine months—will know how to create suitable irrigable land behind the trenches.
Finally, if you still have a few old high-lift pumps from Texas or other places—where your oil wells dried out—we would be more than grateful to take those too. Sometime later—possibly within eight to twenty months of serious agricultural activity—we will gladly approach you with a valid bank-check as a token of our appreciation..."
P/S Help us with the shipping costs and deduct the same from your already budgeted "Scrap Disposal Account"; given we are providing you with free dumping sites. Please do not send any nuclear waste alongside! Besides we will supply you with reasonably priced pork once our "Gander Program" gets underway!"
Signed
DziYAMBAKATA of Malawi
This is what I call "Cascading Networking". It gets results. Try it!
The author can also be contacted on zivaiclaude@gmail.com
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