{UAH} A hungry Malawian is an angry Malawian; ask Joyce Banda - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
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A hungry Malawian is an angry Malawian; ask Joyce Banda - Comment
In Summary
When one crashes in the way Mrs Banda did, finishing in third place behind two opposition candidates, the whole thing takes on the character of a massive earthquake, leaving onlookers marvelling at its sheer intensity as they count its victims.
One of the most momentous events to have occurred in Africa of late was the defeat at the polls of Malawi's Dr Joyce Banda. It is not often that sitting presidents lose elections around here.
An incumbent suffering defeat therefore strikes many as truly out of this world. And even when they lose, they usually come second.
So when one crashes in the way Mrs Banda did, finishing in third place behind two opposition candidates, the whole thing takes on the character of a massive earthquake, leaving onlookers marvelling at its sheer intensity as they count its victims.
In the case of Malawi, the most bewildered onlookers are foreigners who did not see Banda's defeat coming.
Thanks to popular media, much of what outsiders knew, suggested she was a breath of fresh air that Malawians couldn't possibly want to exchange for someone else so soon after she replaced the famously abrasive Bingu wa Mutharika.
For one thing, she was one of only two women presidents on the continent, making Malawi stand out as a country where male chauvinism, patriarchy, and conservatism are no barriers to women assuming the highest office in the land.
Moreover, as much myth-making about women and leadership goes, she was supposed to be a better leader than her male counterparts whose tenures in office are usually accompanied by, among other things, rampant corruption and abuse of power. And so, outsiders imagined Malawians couldn't possibly want another man in office so soon after tasting superior female leadership.
Moreover, she had replaced an autocratic predecessor who had even tried literally to sneak his younger brother into State House as his successor, an attempt Mrs Banda had resisted successfully.
With all that in the background, why on earth would Malawians want her out?
Well, news from Malawi now reveals that what outsiders imagined and believed they knew about the feelings of Malawians towards their leader did not reflect reality. What Malawians were living on a day-to-day basis, according to local analysts, was a steadily unfolding failure of leadership.
Although the lady was given to making grand gestures such as the dramatic selling off of Bingu's presidential jet, Malawians found her not to be good enough at fighting the cancer of corruption that popular lore portrays as a preserve of male leadership.
So bad was she at combating graft, it now turns out, that eventually few believed, rightly or wrongly, that she was above dipping her own fingers into the public till.
Just as bad, possibly worse, was the rapid deterioration in the food security that Malawi had achieved under Mutharika's leadership, thanks to his inspired decision, apparently against stiff opposition by the donor community, to dole out cheap, subsidised fertilisers to peasant farmers. That produced bumper harvests of maize, the country's staple food.
Within just a year of Banda's coming to power, however, famine had left 2 million Malawians exposed to serious hunger.
In a response that smacked of playing politics with people's stomachs in a way advocates of female leadership would associate with male leaders, the good lady took to distributing sacks of maize at her political rallies.
According to a local analyst, no president, however saintly, was going to survive the combined effect of corruption and hunger on the public mood.
The issue of mass hunger, in a country where only a few years ago food security had been achieved, is particularly striking and worthy of detailed discussion. One of the least discussed topics in African academic, policy and even media circles is the role agriculture, smallholder agriculture especially, played in elevating other previously poor regions of the world to enviable prosperity.
For example, it is not uncommon for discussions about why East Asian countries have done so well to dwell on the role Western generosity with aid played. Of course aid played a significant role, as did other factors, such as political stability, technology transfers, and strategic skills development.
However, there is a whole range of focused studies, some coming out of the University of Leiden's Tracking Development project, demonstrating that smallholder agriculture formed the base on which all that rested. First of all, it provided the food without which much-needed political stability would have been virtually impossible to guarantee.
East Asian leaders understood the real meaning of the dictum "a hungry man is an angry man." They therefore did what they could to ensure that the masses were well fed. That meant pumping financial and other resources into peasant agriculture.
Second, increased productivity meant that smallholder farmers could make money from tilling the land. Putting money into the pockets of millions of small farmers meant they could buy manufactured goods and guarantee emerging industries a market for their products, as well as jobs for the non-farming jobseekers.
Now compare that with the noises African governments make about the need to industrialise, while simultaneously merely paying lip service to investment in agriculture.
So what will it take for Africa's politicians to accord agriculture its due importance? No less than continent-wide political revolts of the kind that felled Dr Banda, it seems to me.
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