opportunity
Greg Mills
I recently travelled to Malawi at the invitation of an archbishop to attend a conference on Peacemaking in Africa. Like the other 100-plus participants, I was invited under the pretext of contributing to peace in Africa.
Speakers at the event, run by an outfit known as African NGOs Against the War (Acnawa), were supposedly to have included Julius Nyerere and the President of Malawi, Bakili Muluzi. I went because South Africans are often accused of being out of touch with Africa and its problems. This was an opportunity to see and learn firsthand.
The self-styled “archbishop” turned out to be not a Malawian at all, but a Zambian based inBotswana. He admitted to me he had been expelled from the Roman Catholic Church in 1983 – due partly, it became apparent, to his marriage (seemingly something even a modernising Vatican frowns upon) to a Tanzanian who has borne him seven children. Now heading up Ministers for Healing International, he claimed to have received the blessing and approval for Acnawa from the late Mother Teresa, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and the Organisation for African Unity.
However, from the correspondence he showed me, this amounted to little more than letters of vague support. No Nyerere pitched up, while Muluzi sent his deputy.
On arrival at the Mount Soche hotel in Blantyre I was introduced to his eccentric “Grace” and was handed a magazine detailing the violence in Mzuzu in the north of Malawi, which occurred during the second democratic election on June 15 1999.
The conference was clearly not really focused on ending African conflicts per se, but on promoting, first, a particular sort of dialogue around Malawi’s own internal problems and, second, Acnawa and the “archbishop”.
The event was not funded, as it transpired, by independent sources, but, as the “archbishop” finally conceded, by the Malawian government itself. It was apparently hatched in response to a meeting run three weeks earlier in the capital Lilongwe by an independent NGO examining the same issue.
To make matters worse, the “archbishop” attempted to impose his agenda on the conference in an authoritarian, argumentative and patronising manner, his language alternating between spiritual blessings and blatant disregard for convention and dismissal of legitimate questions, particularly over the funding of the conference.
There are around 200 NGOs in Malawi – including the Youth Watch Society, the Association for Dialogue and Reconciliation, and the Direct Aid Society – mostly established since political liberalisation in 1994, and mostly staffed by bright, educated and under-paid activists.
This brings me to the flip, and more positive, side. The participants and Africa’s sincerity and willingness to meet its challenges cannot, I discovered, be measured from a few self-important opportunists. The critical reaction of the attendees to the “archbishop’s” motives and style was an encouraging illustration of democracy in action. Argumentative to a fault, perhaps, their rejection and substitution of his agenda was the most heartening aspect of the entire event, as was their considered approach to youth and gender issues.
Malawi faces immense developmental challenges. It has an annual per capita income of just $210. Aids has driven the life expectancy down to about 36. Economic growth is slow and the country heavily dependent on foreign largesse, though it remains an isolated diplomatic entrept with just 11 residential foreign missions in Lilongwe.
Muluzi is attempting to broaden these international ties and break out of the isolation imposed by the repressive 31- years of rule of his predecessor, Kamuzu Hastings Banda.
Hence the plans to open new missions in Taipei, Cairo and Tripoli.
There are tensions scarcely below Malawian society’s surface. Political challenges reflect religious and regional divides (25% of the population and the president are Muslim), the cause of much of the political violence.
Without Banda’s authoritarianism these differences are now public. Malawians argue that while things perhaps ran more efficiently during Banda’s time, there is no option other than full democracy.
The greatest tragedy is arguably their naivet in blindly trusting in leadership – leadership which too often in Malawi and elsewhere in Africa has enriched itself at the expense of ordinary people. If the conference is anything to go by, this passive deference to authority is being challenged by the actions, particularly, of the younger generation.
This process can only make Africa more democratic, accountable and a better place to live. Without freedom and the rule of law, societies and economies alike cannot prosper.
For me this was the important lesson of this episode.
Dr Greg Mills is the national director of the South African Institute of International Affairs based at the University of the Witwatersrand