In many parts of the world, democracy can seem something abstract and immutable, a bit like mountains rising in the distance. In these regions, voting is not a victory, but a drudgery.
This is not the case in Msundwe, a small town distributed on either side of a road lined with stalls selling beans, maize and cabbage, about forty minutes by car from Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. Democracy here is as real and fresh as the scars people still bear after the beatings, shootings and gang rapes three years ago.
A steep road to democracy
“Residents of the region had risen up against the former governmentsays Kondwani Mangani, a 25-year-old motorcycle taxi driver. The police came and brutalized people.” Shops were ransacked and at least 18 women were gang-raped by police sent, according to an official report, to put an end to protests against the theft of the presidential election by the outgoing head of state, Peter Mutharika. [Président de 2014 à 2020. Lors de l’élection présidentielle de 2019, il l’emporta de peu sur son adversaire, Lazarus Chakwera, qui dénonça des résultats frauduleux.]
In 2020, the Constitutional Court of Malawi annulled these elections and ordered a new poll. This was won by Lazarus Chakwera, an evangelical pastor and reformer determined to end corruption and revive growth.
Malawi’s dogged defense of democracy has been widely hailed as a victory for the rule of law in a region doomed to damnation by autocrats. It has also revived hope for renewal in this country of around 20 million inhabitants which has persisted in remaining the poorest country in peace in the world.
The first two years of Lazarus Chakwera’s tenure, however, provided a disheartening glimpse of how difficult it is for even a well-meaning leader to root out corruption and revive a parched agricultural economy in times of climate crisis.
Conjunction of crises
Chakwera, who oozes charisma and speaks like an American evangelical preacher, admits that he has made no progress on his three main priorities, which were creating jobs, improving security food and wealth creation. According to him, the main cause of his failure was a “conjunction of crises”.
The Covid-19 pandemic first hit the economy hard, causing growth to fall from 5.4% in 2019 to 0.9% the following year. Then came Ana, one of those increasingly frequent tropical storms battering the country. It ravaged crops, with a huge impact on food production, and inflicted damage on hydroelectric power stations, which supply 30% of Malawi’s electricity, leading to power cuts. The war in Ukraine then drove up the price of fertilizer and fuel, two of Malawi’s main imports, which hurt its foreign currency reserves. Today, the shortage of fertilizer and gasoline is felt. “My dream didn’t really turn out the way it should have,” sighs the president.
Exogenous shocks and natural disasters largely explain the difficulties faced by Malawi in recent times. But they do not explain the sixty years or so of economic stagnation that the country has known since its independence in 1964, and which left it with a GDP per capita of only 545 dollars.
Part of Malawi’s problems stem from the fact that it is a small, landlocked country, poor in natural resources and dependent on neighbors who have often been at war. According to development economist Paul Collier, Malawi would struggle to get rich even if it had the best leaders and the best policies in the world.
With a little of these two ingredients, its per capita growth rate has been just 1.5% per year for almost seven decades, says Stefan Dercon, another development economist. “It takes a special effort to get such poor results,” he quips in his latest book, Gambling on Development [“Miser sur le développement”, non traduit en français].
An interventionist economic model
Cet “special effort” was provided by a small elite who are as greedy as they are committed to the old statist policies of Hastings Banda, the former president and dictator of Malawi. Banda liked to control everything from the prices of agricultural products to the length of women’s skirts. Although Malawi got rid of Banda in 1994, it remained under the thumb of the interventionist state established by its former ruler.
About 80% of Malawians make a living off the land. Instead of encouraging farmers to choose freely what they want to grow and sell, the government interferes in their business by fixing prices (which people ignore), banning exports from time to time and distributing bags of fertilizer and seeds to the poorest, whether they want them or not. This expenditure represents 1.5% of GDP. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute, importing a bag of maize would cost five times less than importing the fertilizer needed to grow that bag.
One of the reasons why subsidies are maintained despite common sense is ideological. Malawian Agriculture Minister Robin Lowe says the aid is aimed at ensuring Malawi’s food self-sufficiency “not only at the level of the country, but also of the families”. Another reason is certainly that the contracts relating to fertilizers make it possible to make juicy profits.
Lazarus Chakwera has begun to tackle corruption by staffing the anti-corruption office with a new director, who is working hard to follow through on a case involving politicians, judges and journalists. But reducing corruption will not be enough. It will also require freeing up the agricultural market and removing regulations that make it difficult to create businesses and jobs.
“Malawi’s biggest problem, says a seasoned Western diplomat, it is that his government continues to interfere in everything.”