It has been a long while since the debate on the quota system started and it shows no signs of letting up — with twists and turns along the way, some of which are enlightening while others are outright ridiculous.
But what started as a serious and innocent debate on a matter of sharing the national cake equally has degenerated into a tribal tiff, with even President Bingu wa Mutharika himself getting sucked up in the tribal mud.
That the quota system has been established to right some wrong (perceived or real) is no sin, no, no sin at all if the reasons be right and you could say the president is within his limits to champion it.
President Mutharika then goes ahead to quote figures to justify his adoption of the quota system, some of which are as illuminating as they are confusing and only help in stockpiling the sense of suspicion to the whole saga.
First, he says the civil service is overpopulated with people from the Northern Region at the super scale in the government, which should be immoral if malicious intent can be proved in the matter. He buttresses his point on the quota system and the overpopulation in government with statistics which no doubt he should be privy to — which is no problem if the figures be right.
But he doesn’t stop there. He minutes, in detail, about how nepotism has eaten into Mzuzu University where people from the Northern Region dominate. Then he also throws into the mix how a region that has 12 percent of the national population and contributes only 20 percent to the economy should dominate places at the public universities.
Which, if you look at it closely, should be no problem at all. After all, as president, he must balance the national cake and if one region takes what ‘doesn’t belong’ to it, he has every reason to come to the rescue.
Then, out of the blues, he singles out an obscure Mzuzu Corner, which, before this week, was largely unknown beyond Chancellor College. If he were not president, I should have laughed at him all the way to his retirement day but he’s a president and an old man at that. And our culture demands that we must defer to our elders.
But anyone who knows Chancellor College very well should be either laughing at or feeling sorry for Mutharika. Mzuzu Corner is a sophisticated piece of ludicrous fiction which should never be peddled by anyone in that venerable office.
Mzuzu Corner is some place outside a cafe at Chancellor College where — to my knowledge — no lecturer visits for any other purpose, let alone do the unthinkable of leaking examinations to students.
We know the country faces a pervasive problem of examination cheating at primary and secondary school levels but to take it up further to the university is outright ridiculous. By making this accusation, Mutharika is casting aspersions on the academic abilities of graduates from the northern region and the moral uprightness of lecturers from the region.
I’m inclined to believe the president is being sarcastic or someone is deliberately misguiding the president. It reminds me of one of Aesop’s fables about an emperor who walked naked in the streets, in the vain belief he was wearing a very expensive attire after being conned by two swindlers.
The swindlers declared they could manufacture the finest cloth to be imagined whose material had the quality of being invisible to any man “who was unfit for his office or unpardonably stupid.”
Thus, the king, having being duped, ‘wore’ the attire and walked in the streets of his kingdom to show off his ‘expensive garment’, when, in sooth, he was walking about butt naked!
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Sunday, November 1, 2009
On being un-Malawian
Mzamo, Malawi’s representative to Big Brother, is un-Malawian. She smokes like a chimney (very un-Malawian); she drinks like fish (absolutely un-Malawian); and to cap it all, she just had sex in the house and in public at that (outrageously un-Malawian).
A Malawian (and a Malawian woman at that) doesn’t smoke like a chimney (cigarettes are for men); never drinks like fish (it’s another man thing); and, well, does not get involved in embarrassing ‘sexcapades’ by any stretch (that’s the men’s terrain). Right? Wrong, very wrong!
I can understand the outrage from her family (I can’t think of any that wouldn’t be) that one of their own has just disgraced them (walaula mtundu) but that is their private grief and they are justified to it. Hence, I don’t believe, for a moment, that we, 14 million Malawians packed in a very tiny country, should be falling all over ourselves trying to prove we are more aggrieved than the next person.
Malawians love their cigarettes and you only have to look at how many people are puffing away their sorrows to appreciate this fact. Malawians worship their beer. Such is our reverence for the stuff that we have turned every corner in the townships into a drinking place. Lucius Banda sang a song about the romance between the Ngoni’s and their beer and that speaks volumes. Some brilliant scientists in Thyolo discovered you can distil a lot of kachasu if ARVs are used as an ingredient.
As for having sex in public, well, don’t skin me alive for this. Remember the priest and the nun at the airport; another priest and a woman in Mangochi (who were caught twice having sex in a car) and ask the police about how many people are caught in uncompromising positions in cars at night.
Tell me which resthouses (and some motels and lodges) are in the actual business of providing accommodation to genuine visitors. We have too many resthouses in towns (which are nothing more than ‘sexhouses’) where people walk in in pairs to do what we can only imagine. You might say, at least, they seek the decency of cover but what decency is there when it leaves little room for imagination?
Big Brother is a reality show, which requires of the contestants to behave in the manner they would at home (except that they have cameras and microphones recording their every move) — not as actors acting the roles of their life.
By the way, were Mzamo a man, would the outrage have been this strident? I’m not, in any way, trying to justify her indiscretions. In fact, she should have known the heartache she would be causing back home with any ‘misstep’.
Last year, Hazel Warren came back without lighting the sparks in the house but she received a hero’s welcome because she had behaved like a ‘Malawian’ just as Code Sangala before her. I have my doubts if Mzamo will be accorded the same accolade because she’s done something un-Malawian. So, who’s more Malawian?
Malawian are not as introverted as Hazel but neither are they as wild as Mzamo. We have the best and the worst of both.
By the way, who’s a bigger national embarrassment (and very un-Malawian) between someone who couldn’t sing the national anthem (dear me!) and another who had sex in Big Brother house? Zein Dudha, for all I know, embarrassed himself and the nation; Mzamo has embarrassed herself largely, her family to a large extent yes, but the nation? No, I don’t think so.
A Malawian (and a Malawian woman at that) doesn’t smoke like a chimney (cigarettes are for men); never drinks like fish (it’s another man thing); and, well, does not get involved in embarrassing ‘sexcapades’ by any stretch (that’s the men’s terrain). Right? Wrong, very wrong!
I can understand the outrage from her family (I can’t think of any that wouldn’t be) that one of their own has just disgraced them (walaula mtundu) but that is their private grief and they are justified to it. Hence, I don’t believe, for a moment, that we, 14 million Malawians packed in a very tiny country, should be falling all over ourselves trying to prove we are more aggrieved than the next person.
Malawians love their cigarettes and you only have to look at how many people are puffing away their sorrows to appreciate this fact. Malawians worship their beer. Such is our reverence for the stuff that we have turned every corner in the townships into a drinking place. Lucius Banda sang a song about the romance between the Ngoni’s and their beer and that speaks volumes. Some brilliant scientists in Thyolo discovered you can distil a lot of kachasu if ARVs are used as an ingredient.
As for having sex in public, well, don’t skin me alive for this. Remember the priest and the nun at the airport; another priest and a woman in Mangochi (who were caught twice having sex in a car) and ask the police about how many people are caught in uncompromising positions in cars at night.
Tell me which resthouses (and some motels and lodges) are in the actual business of providing accommodation to genuine visitors. We have too many resthouses in towns (which are nothing more than ‘sexhouses’) where people walk in in pairs to do what we can only imagine. You might say, at least, they seek the decency of cover but what decency is there when it leaves little room for imagination?
Big Brother is a reality show, which requires of the contestants to behave in the manner they would at home (except that they have cameras and microphones recording their every move) — not as actors acting the roles of their life.
By the way, were Mzamo a man, would the outrage have been this strident? I’m not, in any way, trying to justify her indiscretions. In fact, she should have known the heartache she would be causing back home with any ‘misstep’.
Last year, Hazel Warren came back without lighting the sparks in the house but she received a hero’s welcome because she had behaved like a ‘Malawian’ just as Code Sangala before her. I have my doubts if Mzamo will be accorded the same accolade because she’s done something un-Malawian. So, who’s more Malawian?
Malawian are not as introverted as Hazel but neither are they as wild as Mzamo. We have the best and the worst of both.
By the way, who’s a bigger national embarrassment (and very un-Malawian) between someone who couldn’t sing the national anthem (dear me!) and another who had sex in Big Brother house? Zein Dudha, for all I know, embarrassed himself and the nation; Mzamo has embarrassed herself largely, her family to a large extent yes, but the nation? No, I don’t think so.
An excuse for failure
A few months ago, the momentum for change of leadership in the Malawi Congress Party seemed so strong and so inexorable that we expected it to end swiftly with the target of the movement throwing in the towel and the party marching on in triumph.
But one act of nature checked it in mid-step and changed its destiny. The death of Ishmael Chafukira, the leader of the movement, seemed to throw any gains it had made (if any) into the gutter.
Some commentators, though, saw this as an opportunity for other people in the ‘movement’ to come to the fore and make this not just Chafukira’s personal vendetta against Malawi Congress Party leader John Tembo but a fight for genuine cause in the party.
Any such expectations, however, vanished when the other members of the movement were reluctant to take over the motion to ‘strip’ Tembo of the position of leader of opposition in Parliament. But if that was bad enough, some revelations this week have put paid to any pretentions that this was a collective fight.
While some members of the taskforce want to fight against the party from within (which should be encouraged as it fosters intra-party democracy), others are of the opinion they are better off forming a new party, appropriately named New Malawi Congress Party.
They have a precedent, they say, with Gwanda Chakuamba and his New Republican Party which was an offshoot of the Republican Party. But perhaps, they needn’t have gone that far for inspiration. Hetherwick Ntaba, erstwhile spokesman for the MCP, broke ranks with the party to form a dubiously named New Congress for Democracy.
Suffice to say, none of the two examples inspires any confidence in anyone; NCD was buried the day the 2004 elections results were announced, having emerged out of the polls with none of the respect it had craved for; the NRP is still fighting a battle of identities and to its credit, it is flourishing — only just — but it is just bidding its times before it also keels over.
The moniker for new party aside, I was just alarmed by the insinuations made by some members of the taskforce, who, in their show of cowardice and admission of failure, are looking for mysterious killers who are out to get them.
They claimed they don’t want to get ‘martyred’ like Chafukira — which is some statement that begs a host of questions than they care to answer. Do they know more about the death of Chafukira than we — or for that matter, the police — do?
From the innuendos, one can tell the members know the ‘murderers’ of Chafukira who have been left scot-free, perhaps to harass, maim or even kill the other members of the taskforce.
Is it the case that I don’t know anything or is it that there is a false cause and effect established by members of the taskforce who want to use it to camouflage their failure?
But one act of nature checked it in mid-step and changed its destiny. The death of Ishmael Chafukira, the leader of the movement, seemed to throw any gains it had made (if any) into the gutter.
Some commentators, though, saw this as an opportunity for other people in the ‘movement’ to come to the fore and make this not just Chafukira’s personal vendetta against Malawi Congress Party leader John Tembo but a fight for genuine cause in the party.
Any such expectations, however, vanished when the other members of the movement were reluctant to take over the motion to ‘strip’ Tembo of the position of leader of opposition in Parliament. But if that was bad enough, some revelations this week have put paid to any pretentions that this was a collective fight.
While some members of the taskforce want to fight against the party from within (which should be encouraged as it fosters intra-party democracy), others are of the opinion they are better off forming a new party, appropriately named New Malawi Congress Party.
They have a precedent, they say, with Gwanda Chakuamba and his New Republican Party which was an offshoot of the Republican Party. But perhaps, they needn’t have gone that far for inspiration. Hetherwick Ntaba, erstwhile spokesman for the MCP, broke ranks with the party to form a dubiously named New Congress for Democracy.
Suffice to say, none of the two examples inspires any confidence in anyone; NCD was buried the day the 2004 elections results were announced, having emerged out of the polls with none of the respect it had craved for; the NRP is still fighting a battle of identities and to its credit, it is flourishing — only just — but it is just bidding its times before it also keels over.
The moniker for new party aside, I was just alarmed by the insinuations made by some members of the taskforce, who, in their show of cowardice and admission of failure, are looking for mysterious killers who are out to get them.
They claimed they don’t want to get ‘martyred’ like Chafukira — which is some statement that begs a host of questions than they care to answer. Do they know more about the death of Chafukira than we — or for that matter, the police — do?
From the innuendos, one can tell the members know the ‘murderers’ of Chafukira who have been left scot-free, perhaps to harass, maim or even kill the other members of the taskforce.
Is it the case that I don’t know anything or is it that there is a false cause and effect established by members of the taskforce who want to use it to camouflage their failure?
The names we have
One of my friends told me a story I found hard to believe on account of it being too ludicrous to be true. It was about some guy in some posh residential area who fortressed his house it looked like a maximum security prison than a residential place of free people. The perimeter fence was thick and high; the burglar bars on the doors and the windows were so dense and so strong only powerful machinery could prize them apart.
One day, however, he woke up to find his living room cleaned of everything, including the fibres from his carpet. For all the trouble in securing his house and its contents, he couldn’t understand how the thieves had found their way in.
An inquest of sorts into the burglary revealed the house’s Achilles’ heel. The burglars had gained entry to inside the perimeter fences through a drain. But as one group was burrowing their way through the culvert, another was having an altercation outside the gate, which drew the guards and the dogs.
With attention diverted, the other group clambered over the roof, removed the iron sheets and bingo! They were inside the house. In no time, they had swept the living room clean and melted into the comfort of darkness.
It was one story I found too implausible — that was until about two years ago when another colleague told me of a similar burglary at their office. He even showed me the pictures of the ransacked offices at Chichiri along Chipembere Highway in Blantyre.
President Bingu wa Mutharika’s endorsement of the quota system early this week reminded me of those two incidences.
I have no problem with the quota system or any other system if it guarantees quality and equity in the education system. But I believe the president’s endorsement is premised on the wrong grounds.
The president quoted some impressive figures to show discrepancies in government employment but one wonders, who employs these people? Is the quota system the only way of solving the imbalances in government employment system?
As Mutharika threw the figures in the faces of Malawians, perhaps he should have asked himself what was wrong (if anything) with Chikwawa that a district with a “population of 435,895 people only has 55 people in the government super scale level [grade P8 and above]. Yet Chitipa and Karonga, whose combined population is not even half of Chikwawa, have 225 in the super scale grades.”
Mutharika, as a policy maker, is wrong to prescribe medicine basing on symptomatic statistics. I don’t think there has been a deliberate policy in the north to over-represent itself in the university or in government.
Government’s quota system as affirmative action, which is what is called positive discrimination in policy studies, can only be fair in a country like South Africa where there was a deliberate policy to discriminate the blacks in the education system. That has not been the case in Malawi.
The solution, in my view, does not lie in government regulating the selections to the university but in it finding out what is wrong for Karonga and Chitipa to have more people on scales ‘inconsistent’ with their populations. Was nepotism at work in employing people or selecting students from Chitipa and Karonga? If nepotism was at work, what would stop people from Karonga and Chitipa from being employed even in the face of the quota system?
By the way, how do we classify someone as being from Karonga? Suppose, a Nyirenda from Karonga marries someone in Chikwawa, they have kids and they live in Blantyre. With time, the parents’ divorce and the wife takes custody of children and takes them to Chikwawa where they live until university selection time comes around.
Would the system accept the children (the Nyirenda’s) as being truly from Chikwawa? Obviously the system will be reluctant to accept a Nyirenda from Chikwawa. Anticipating those challenges, the children might change their name to Nyarenda.
Let’s not forget the past. MCP had a similar policy but people beat the system. People became like Bandas and Phiris and presented their district of origin as Kasungu or some other district when they had never set a foot there. They got selected. Some are still stuck with those names. Others dispensed of them.
By the way, did I hear President Mutharika was at one point known as Webster Thom? The president is on record to have said he changed his name because he had wanted to travel incognito for fear of persecution by the MCP secret operatives. What would prevent someone from changing his name to enter the university ‘incognito’?
So, just like that man who built a fortress for a house but found it wanting, the president’s policy might have good intentions (?) but people will still circumvent the system all the same. After all, what’s in a name?
There should be better ways of redistributing the national cake besides the quota system. The quota system is only a temporary measure meant to address a deep-seated problem. And identifying it is a bigger problem.
One day, however, he woke up to find his living room cleaned of everything, including the fibres from his carpet. For all the trouble in securing his house and its contents, he couldn’t understand how the thieves had found their way in.
An inquest of sorts into the burglary revealed the house’s Achilles’ heel. The burglars had gained entry to inside the perimeter fences through a drain. But as one group was burrowing their way through the culvert, another was having an altercation outside the gate, which drew the guards and the dogs.
With attention diverted, the other group clambered over the roof, removed the iron sheets and bingo! They were inside the house. In no time, they had swept the living room clean and melted into the comfort of darkness.
It was one story I found too implausible — that was until about two years ago when another colleague told me of a similar burglary at their office. He even showed me the pictures of the ransacked offices at Chichiri along Chipembere Highway in Blantyre.
President Bingu wa Mutharika’s endorsement of the quota system early this week reminded me of those two incidences.
I have no problem with the quota system or any other system if it guarantees quality and equity in the education system. But I believe the president’s endorsement is premised on the wrong grounds.
The president quoted some impressive figures to show discrepancies in government employment but one wonders, who employs these people? Is the quota system the only way of solving the imbalances in government employment system?
As Mutharika threw the figures in the faces of Malawians, perhaps he should have asked himself what was wrong (if anything) with Chikwawa that a district with a “population of 435,895 people only has 55 people in the government super scale level [grade P8 and above]. Yet Chitipa and Karonga, whose combined population is not even half of Chikwawa, have 225 in the super scale grades.”
Mutharika, as a policy maker, is wrong to prescribe medicine basing on symptomatic statistics. I don’t think there has been a deliberate policy in the north to over-represent itself in the university or in government.
Government’s quota system as affirmative action, which is what is called positive discrimination in policy studies, can only be fair in a country like South Africa where there was a deliberate policy to discriminate the blacks in the education system. That has not been the case in Malawi.
The solution, in my view, does not lie in government regulating the selections to the university but in it finding out what is wrong for Karonga and Chitipa to have more people on scales ‘inconsistent’ with their populations. Was nepotism at work in employing people or selecting students from Chitipa and Karonga? If nepotism was at work, what would stop people from Karonga and Chitipa from being employed even in the face of the quota system?
By the way, how do we classify someone as being from Karonga? Suppose, a Nyirenda from Karonga marries someone in Chikwawa, they have kids and they live in Blantyre. With time, the parents’ divorce and the wife takes custody of children and takes them to Chikwawa where they live until university selection time comes around.
Would the system accept the children (the Nyirenda’s) as being truly from Chikwawa? Obviously the system will be reluctant to accept a Nyirenda from Chikwawa. Anticipating those challenges, the children might change their name to Nyarenda.
Let’s not forget the past. MCP had a similar policy but people beat the system. People became like Bandas and Phiris and presented their district of origin as Kasungu or some other district when they had never set a foot there. They got selected. Some are still stuck with those names. Others dispensed of them.
By the way, did I hear President Mutharika was at one point known as Webster Thom? The president is on record to have said he changed his name because he had wanted to travel incognito for fear of persecution by the MCP secret operatives. What would prevent someone from changing his name to enter the university ‘incognito’?
So, just like that man who built a fortress for a house but found it wanting, the president’s policy might have good intentions (?) but people will still circumvent the system all the same. After all, what’s in a name?
There should be better ways of redistributing the national cake besides the quota system. The quota system is only a temporary measure meant to address a deep-seated problem. And identifying it is a bigger problem.
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