Like most Malawians at home and in the diaspora, last night and this morning I have been glued to one of the country's radio stations on the Internet listening to the results of the presidential and parliamentary elections held yesterday. These are the country's fourth elections since the onset of the new democratic dispensation in 1994. By all indications the turnout was heavy and the elections were peaceful, free and fair, although there are reports that the state-owned media did not acquit itself well in its blatant support for the ruling party. Arguably, these are the most important elections since the demise fifteen years ago of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda's ruthless thirty-year dictatorship that traumatized this incredibly beautiful country and sent many of us into involuntary exile in the 1970s and 1980s.
The elections have confounded many local and foreign pundits and observers who predicted a close contest between President Mutharika's ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the opposition coalition of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) and the United Democratic Front (UDF) led by the MCP's Presidential candidate, Mr. John Z.U. Tembo. It will not even be close. According to the informal results I have been able to cull from the radio broadcasts, President Mutharika and the DPP are headed for resounding victories over Mr. Tembo and the MCP and the UDF.[UPDATE MALAWI ELECTORAL COMMISSION RESULTS AS ANNOUNCED ON 5/23/2009: Presidential: Dr. Mutharika--2,946,103; Mr. Tembo--1,370.044; 5 other candidates--148,693; Parliemntary seats: DPP--114; MCP--26; UDF--17; Independents--27; 3 other parties--3]
This is truly remarkable considering that the DPP was only formed four years ago after the new president fell out in a power struggle with his predecessor, President Bakili Muluzi, who had anointed him in the hope of continuing to call the shots as Chairman of the UDF. For the next four years President Mutharika faced continuous threats of impeachment from his erstwhile colleagues in the UDF and the opposition party, Dr. Banda's old MCP, still tainted by its repressive history, and not helped by the fact that the party was led by one of Dr. Banda's most feared and loathed henchmen.
The first thing to observe about the likely results of the elections is that the UDF will be wiped out as a political force, thanks in no small measure to the shenanigans of its delusional leader, former President Muluzi who ruled from 1994 to 2004 and fancied himself a master political strategist and the king maker in the just concluded elections. When he was barred from contesting the elections by the Electoral Commission in mid-March, he opportunistically threw his support behind the MCP presidential candidate and forced his hapless party to enter into a hurried coalition with the MCP.
This was not lost on the electorate, which seems to have decisively rejected the UDF-MCP marriage of convenience and the machinations of their discredited leaders who have detested each other for years. Several stalwarts of the UDF and MCP have bitten the political dust to DPP candidates and independents. Clearly, the records of neither the MCP nor UDF and their respective leaders inspired much confidence among the electorate.
But this was not simply a vote against the devious MCP-UDF coalition. It is a tribute to the power of incumbency, the ability of sitting presidents and their parties to marshal the material, discursive, and performative resources of state power and mobilize the electorate for victory. Among Africa's new democracies that have adopted two-term limits, it is rare for incumbent presidents to lose their re-election bids. This is of course not confined to Africa. Remember the 2004 U.S. elections won by President George Bush despite his staggering incompetence that squandered the country's political capital in two misguided wars and economic capital in gross mismanagement.
President Mutharika and his party also won on their record. They have presided over Malawi's fastest economic growth in decades, averaging an annual rate of 8% over the last three years (reaching as high as 9.7% in 2008 the second highest in the world), up from an average growth rate of 1.6% between 1999-2003. While Malawi remains a desperately poor country, poverty rates are declining, although the country's is unlikely to achieve some of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) by 2015, especially in terms of realizing gender equality in education, employment, health, and political representation, and reducing environmental degradation and dependence on official development assistance.
According to the Malawi_MDG_2008 Report the number of people living below the poverty line fell from 54% in 1998 to 40% in 2007, while the proportion of the ultra poor fell from 28% to 15% during the same period. Child mortality fell from 134 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1992 to 69 in 2006 and is projected to fall to 32 by 2015 surpassing the MDG target. The HIV prevalence rate among 15-24 year old pregnant women fell from 24.1% in 1998 to 12.3% in 2006 and at the current rate it will fall to 2.9% in 2015. Access to safe drinking water increased from 47% in 1990 to 75% in 2006. And there have been remarkable improvements in transport infrastructure and communication services from cell phones to the internet.
The apparent victories of President Mutharika and the DPP are also remarkable in how they have challenged received political wisdom about ethnic and regional voting patterns in Malawi. The incumbent president and his party have won across the country including districts and constituencies seen as opposition strongholds. Undoubtedly, people voted for their material interests rather than their cultural affiliations, for the policies of the ruling party, not the promises of the opposition parties, for development, which the Mutharika has delivered better than the UDF and MCP governments.
This is a cautionary tale against those who tend to analyze African politics in oversimplified ethnic and culturalist terms and underestimate the capacity of African voters to act in their best interests as rational political actors. The Malawi elections not only demonstrate the consolidation of the country's democracy, but also the growing consummation of development and democracy; they gesture towards the fragile growth of a democratic developmental state.
To be sure, President Mutharika often invokes, and has reinstated, some of the political symbols of the founding president, including his sartorial tendencies and the very title of "Ngwazi" (meaning conqueror) which may have endeared him to some of the former dictator's diehard regional supporters, but it is his developmentalist rhetoric and achievments that have won him increasing national support. Unlike the authoritarian developmentalism of the MCP regime under Dr. Banda, this points to a possible democratic developmentalism, regardless of whether or not Dr. Mutharika is a devoted democrat, because his regime is operating in a new democratic dispensation that seems hard to reverse given that it emerged out of protracted popular struggles and is sustained by the vigilances of a more expansive and organized civil society that will not brook a return to the horrific repression of the Banda years.
This election also marks a watershed moment because it is likely to close the curtain on the nationalist generation that has ruled the country since independence in 1964. The incumbent president, Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika is 75 and will be 80 in 2014 and will no longer be eligible after serving his two terms. The main opposition leader, Mr. John Z.U. Tembo, who is 77, will be 82, too old one hopes, to continue his legendary quest for power. The misguided ambitions of the Machiavellian sixty-six year old former President, Mr. Bakili Muluzi, to return to the presidency, were finally buried by the constitutional court last Saturday which dismissed his application to run for a third time.
I have never been particularly enamored by either Mr. Tembo, one of the key architects of the Banda dictatorship, or Mr. Muluzi, who failed Malawi so miserably. In the interests of full disclosure, in the lead up to the historic 1994 multiparty democratic elections, which the UDF won, I was appointed Shadow Minister of Energy and Industry, an appointment I had not ben consulted about or agreed to. My misgivings were reinforced when I did not receive any response to my inquiries into the party's positions on economic and foreign policies, human rights, gender matters, and other pertinent issues. Continuing my life as a professor looked infinitely more attractive than joining a team with little vision for national development and for whom politics was merely a lucrative business, state power a means of accumulation.
It is quite an irony that Malawi, like several other so-called peaceful African nations that have never known war or coups, has yet to make the transition from the nationalist to the postcolonial generations in the constitution of political power and the national imaginary. The vast majority of today's Malawians were born after independence--they are under the age of 45. They now practically staff if not manage many of the country's economic, social, and cultural institutions, but have yet to enjoy full political clout as represented by the powerful presidency. These elections mark the culmination of the mismatch between the political leadership and the economic managers, between the pre-independence and post-independence fractions of the ruling class.
Besides its demographic and social weight, and notwithstanding its internal divisions and hierarchies of class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and ideology, the post-independence generation is more impatient with underdevelopment, more intolerant of authoritarianism, more globalized in its connections and reflexivities, more committed and capable of carrying out a national project of democratic developmentalism. My son is typical of this generation. Currently studying for an MBA, he was deeply invested in the elections, saying if the opposition won it would affect his plans to return to Malawi. Based on conversations with his friends in Malawi on Facebook he was quite confident even before the election count had started that President Mutharika and the DPP would win. He finally won me over as I listened to the election returns. As the last election of the old guard, his generation's rendezvous with history is finally in sight.
First Written May 20, 2009
UPDATES: INTERIM REPORTS BY OBSERVER MISSIONS TO THE ELECTIONS
(MESN) Malawi Election Support Network) Interim Statement
Malawi Commonwealth Observers Issue Interim Statement on Elections
EISA (Electoral Commission of Southern Africa) Observer Mission Interim Statement
