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.