Aid Thoughts

Digesting the difficult decisions of development

Posts Tagged malawi

The Society Wedding of the Year

Apr 21

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, Aid, Governance, Worst practices | 6 Comments

What do you do for money, honey?

Bingu wa Mutharika, the President of Malawi, has just remarried, a few years after the death of his first wife, Ethel. The Times is reporting that it was quite a bash. Bingu arrived in true P. Diddy style, emerging from a white Chrysler flown in from South Africa for the occasion wearing a white tuxedo with white gloves, having driven over two roads specially built to take the bride and groom to Civo Stadium for their restrained and tasteful nuptials. The bridal party arrived in a fleet of new Mercedes’, and the whole wedding is alleged to have cost about GBP 2 million, part of which paid for a twenty-eight tier wedding cake.

Apart from the identity of the joker who convinced Bingu that he looked good in his white tux, the big question here is where the money came from. If these were state funds, it is a perfect example of the kind of spending that the fungibility article from the Lancet raised fears of, and which I discussed last week. Is aid money facilitating this kind of opulence? Two things need to be true before we can conclude this. Firstly, it must be the case that the President used state funds for his wedding. This isn’t clear. The Times article offers the following, neither part of which is particularly convincing:

Senior officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have claimed that the president used public funds for the celebrations, an accusation that the government denies…

The Malawian government’s information minister rejected claims that public money had been used to pay for the wedding. “The [£2m] cost of the wedding has been met by the president himself and friends who wish him well,” he said.

The second issue is whether, even if state funds were used, aid money made any difference. It’s quite possible that the same wedding would have taken place, with the same cost, but with developmental spending suffering even more. If this is the counter-factual, then aid money isn’t facilitating bad spending but mitigating the damage it causes.

With regards to the first issue, as I said in the comments section of Matt’s post on fungibility, audit is where we should be focusing: a comprehensive audit should give us a very good idea of whether or not this money came from Government coffers or Bingu’s personal wealth, together with those of his supporters, some of whom are so fervent I have witnessed them running after his Presidential vehicle waving huge framed posters of him as he disappears from view. I’m going to discuss audit in a bit more depth later this week, but to their credit, the Times does mention the findings of a recent audit of Malawi’s Government expenditure in its article:

A report by the country’s auditor general [showed] that more than £800,000 of public funds had been spent on goods and services between 2003-05 which could not be accounted for.

The drawback? Despite the article being written by a Malawian (Mabvuto Banda, judging by the name, is at least of Malawian heritage), the article fails to point out that the audit reports it refers to relate to a previous Government, that of Bakili Muluzi. Members of this Government have already been investigated and indicted on corruption charges, and further arrests and investigations are always possible.

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The Comforts of Daily Chaos

Jan 14

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, Governance, Worst practices | 6 Comments

Milton: the prototypical eccentric colleague.

Milton: the prototypical eccentric colleague.

This morning I walked into the office and found a colleague ironing clothes on her desk.

Last week, a colleague sent me an SMS saying: ‘my office-mate has given up. She has taken two chairs and a cushion and made a bed to sleep in!’

One year ago, in Malawi, during an important meeting setting out a new debt policy, one staff member was assigned the crucial task of keeping track of the score of Malawi’s World Cup qualifying match against Djibouti. We won 8-1. Productivity has an inverse relationship with uncontainable joy, which in turn increases with each goal. There was literally dancing in the meeting room when news of the eighth goal was relayed to the participants by excited shouting through the window.

A friend of mine, a fellow cricket enthusiast who works for DfID, once explained to me that one particular posting (the Ministry of Finance, I believe) in Jamaica had been extremely sought after in the 1980s and early 1990s. The office building for this post was built directly overlooking Sabina Park, Jamaica’s famous Test Cricket ground. When Viv Richards came to smash the ball out of the ground or the magnificent Malcolm Marshall was bowling hand grenades at 94mph, all work would cease, sometimes for hours at a stretch.

For most of my career, I have worked in developing country Governments directly, sponsored by various donors, but with limited or non-existent outside management. From the Government point of view, the idea is that I function as a civil servant, though one with a remit to help stimulate improvements in the structure of the work done as well as to get involved in the minutiae of civil service work. It’s a privileged position, because once you’ve won the trust and friendship of colleagues, you have as close to an insider view as you ever can of how the Government actually works.

This allows me (and others with similar jobs) to see and hear exactly what Governments think about a donor’s behaviour, policy or personalities. You work with people who have a lifetime’s experience of the country, not just a few years’, and they are not the minority as they usually are for donors and INGOs. There is no better way of grounding one’s ideas about development in a country than to see 30 local people, at least ten of whom have direct power of veto over you, discuss your proposals.

You also get to see all of the glorious idiosyncrasies of a workplace in which many staff are underpaid, underemployed and under-supervised. It’s not a secret that many civil services manage the double act of being both understaffed and (on the whole) underworked. Most Government departments have a core of dedicated, hard-working professionals who will, for salaries that in the North would barely break the minimum wage, work for 12 hours and on weekends to see things through to an adequate completion point. Most also have a large and equally committed core of wasters who do as little as possible, as slowly as possible and with as many eccentricities as their personalities can accommodate.

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Street Fighting Men?

Jan 8

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, Governance, History | 2 Comments

Whatever else a city might be, it is at the same time a place inhabited by a concentration of poor people and, in most cases, the locus of political power that affects their lives. Historically, one of the things city populations have done about this is to demonstrate, make riots or insurrections, or otherwise exert direct pressure on the authorities…

This quote, again from Hobsbawm’s collection of essays, Revolutionaries, has been at the back of my mind for the last few days. Compared to Europe’s historical habit of urban revolt and revolution (the city of Palermo alone had 12 popular insurrections between 1512 and 1866), Sub-Saharan Africa has actually had relatively few mass urban mobilizations that seriously threatened or achieved regime changes. Off the top of my head, I can think of only a few: the ‘IMF Riots’ that brought down Governments in Zambia, Liberia and Sudan in the early 1990s and the unionist insurrection against the Government in Brazzaville in the early 1960s. Of course there is also Zanzibar’s revolution in 1964, though it was not solely an urban phenomenon. Urban struggle against Apartheid was more complex than an insurrection, but clearly counts as well.

There are plenty of demonstrations, though they rarely seriously threaten Governments. There have been military coups, as in Nigeria; some leaders have been deposed by foreign forces or through full-scale civil war; and there have been regimes which have disintegrated into chaos. But the role of the city as a point at which popular rebellion is fomented, carried out and generates new Government is limited. Even independence movements, characterized by urban unrest, found their greatest success through negotiation with colonial powers or guerilla insurgency directed from outside the country altogether. Regime change is common, but rarely popularly-led and powered.

This is surprising for two main reasons. Firstly, there are plenty of Governments in the region that could do with a good shoeing: undemocratic, kleptocratic, violent and morally bankrupt regimes that maintain their hold on power through electoral fraud and intimidation. Secondly, cities in Africa are teeming with huge numbers of unemployed, dissatisfied young males, often with easy access to affordable weapons.

Yet, organized or spontaneous urban insurrection rarely threatens established regimes. Why has this been the case? Are Sub-Saharan African cities less prone to intrigue, or more docile somehow? I don’t think this is the case. There have been violent riots before, such as those in Nairobi in 1982, and more isolated and often smaller demonstrations or riots still occur with moderate regularity. In late 2008 there were a couple in Malawi, both small scale; last year Kampala witnessed some, and there were also demonstrations in Conakry that were met with a violent response from the army.

I also take issue with the common characterization of Africans as infinitely patient, capable of enduring endless suffering with dignity and acceptance. Like anyone else, people in Africa get angry at misgovernment, and they express it. In Swahili, there is a verb ‘to complain’, kulalamika; but people also use a word, dukuduku which can best be translated as a deep-seated, profound grievance. This word is normally used with the verb kutoa, which means to extract or give out, e.g. anatoa dukuduku lake (‘she is giving out her profound grievance’). This apparently minor piece of linguistic evidence has significance: the idea that Africa is a continent of Atlases, holding the weight of the world on their shoulders stoically and silently is at best incorrect.

Rather, there are rather three or four central reasons why mass urban protest rarely shakes Governments. The first two are related: firstly, there is the geographical and physical structure of modern cities; secondly, there is state violence, realized and potential; and thirdly there are the political realities of urban dwellers. Finally, the role of urban centres as political agents has changed. In sum, they have important implications for governance and reform in Africa.

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Game Theories

Oct 15

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa | 4 Comments

A game of Bao/Bawo in Malawi

A game of Bao/Bawo in a market in Malawi

I was recently re-reading sections of my books on Africa, and came across an interesting little aside in John Iliffe’s Africans. Africans is the most useful general history of Africa I’ve read, though the relevant sections of The Birth of the Modern World are brilliant, too. The aside pertains to the most common game in Sub-Saharan Africa, known as Ba(w)o in Malawi, Kenya and Tanzania and Mankala in West Africa. It’s a game in which two players have a set of stones each, and face off with the objective of obtaining (‘eating’) as many of the opponent’s stones as possible, and bringing them to one’s own side of the board. I find it fiendishly difficult, but my Malawian friends play it as second nature with speed and forethought that would make rational choice theorists beam.

Iliffe looks at the game through the lens of a population history of Africa, in which his central argument is that the struggle to increase population in a geographically and climatically hostile continent has been the central force of African cultural and historical change. He writes of the game (my emphasis):

The only leisure activity with a [recorded] history stretching back beyond European contact is the board game … mankala. Played in Ancient Egypt, where a stone board of c. 1500 BC has been found, the game seems to have spread … throughout the continent, except its southern tip… Everywhere it was seen as a test of intelligence. Legend said that Sunjata played it for his life against his rival for power in Mali… Being African, the game was played quickly, publicly, socially, noisily. Islam frowned upon it and replaced it by the more sedate dara … while Ethiopian nobility either played an especially complicated variant or preferred chess. Chess was the game of a stratified society, with unequal pieces and the objective of destroying the opposing forces. In mankala all pieces were of equal value and the aim was to capture the opposing pieces and add them to one’s own. It was the game of a society dedicated to building up its numbers.

In all the years I observed it being played, and the few occasions I braved humiliation and allowed myself to be thrashed at it, this never occurred to me. Chess was developed in land-scarce, populous countries, (India and then Southern Europe); one advances to new land, decimating the forces laying in front of you. Its popularity in America and Russia probably owes more to cultural exchange with chess-playing nations than indigenous factors. In Africa, land has rarely been the constraining factor; thus in Bao one remains in one’s own land, but captures as many of the ‘other’ as possible. You do not kill them, and they contribute to the further prosperity of your land. It’s an interesting insight.

Having a keen interest in Japanese culture as well, a friend and I questioned  if there was a similar interpretation of Go. I’ve read two brilliant books which use Go as a central motif to describe social change. In Kawabata’s The Master of Go conflict is generational, with the aging master playing an elegant but forceful game of classical beauty; his young opponent begins at a more sedate pace but finally explodes into a violence of attacks. In Shan Sha’s The Girl Who Played Go, the conflict is between a Chinese girl and a Japanese soldier, with styles representing their nations. My speculation for a similar theory of Go would be that it is a game for countries where land and people are abundant: hence the emphasis on tactical colonisation and balance. This is just a wild stab in the dark, though. Anyone care to venture a better theory of Go?

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We Can Work It Out! We Can Work It Out!

Sep 15

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Governance, History, Political Economy | 1 Comment

Do we think as one, or are we just joined by circumstance?

Do we think as one, or are we just joined by circumstance?

I recently posted a rambling trail of thoughts about the difficulty of state building in much of Africa. It was a generally bleak assessment: historical circumstances have made state-building difficult due in large part to the historical importance and continuing primacy of sub-national forms of identity. I also suggested that without a strong national identity and state, it’s difficult to transform the economy in the ways needed to develop rapidly.

Having said this, there are examples of countries and leaders within Africa who have explicitly pursued nation-building with some success, and its worth looking at these examples to see what kind of impact this has had on development. The two examples I am most familiar with are Malawi under Hastings ‘Kamuzu’ Banda and Tanzania under Julius Nyerere (Kenneth Kaunda also sought to rule Zambia using the ideology of ‘One Zambia, One Nation’, but I’m less familiar with the ins-and-outs of Zambian history).

What’s most interesting about these examples is how they pursued nation-building policies and why they haven’t gone on to more rapid development than the rest of Africa if state- and nation-building really is important

Nation building in Malawi and Tanzania took similar forms, but through rather different methods. Unity of state and nation was a key ideological component of Hastings Banda’s vision for Malawi in the thirty-odd years he was Life President, and he pursued it vigorously. As a national language, he selected the language spoken by the Chewa, which at the time was considered simply to be a dialect of Chinyanja. Giving it the name ‘Chichewa’, in 1968 the Government began an aggressive campaign suppressing other languages. Books published in Chitumbuka, Chiyao and Chilomwe were suppressed and banned; all instruction was given in Chichewa and English; and there was even a national ‘Chichewa Development Board’.

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If it’s good enough for New Zealand…

Sep 12

Posted by Guest in Africa, Aid, Governance, Worst practices | 1 Comment

By Mark Miller

As a current employee of the Malawian Budget Division, I read with interest Matt’s blog on technological innovation and I’m sure he’ll no doubt be saddened to hear that this computer system is no further ahead than when he left it a year ago.

However, it struck me that in the field of budgeting at least this trait of ‘leapfrogging’ is sadly by no means specific to technology – whenever reforms are undertaken, invariably ‘international best practise’ (normally from New Zealand or some thoroughly un-governable nation) is the recommended yard-stick for governments to aim at.

Another innovation in budgeting championed by the donor community in recent years was ‘Output Based Budgeting’. Every Kwatcha in the Malawian budget is allocated to specific activities with specific indicators and targets. These indicators include deliverables such as ‘number of meetings attended’ and ‘% of office supplies provided adequately’. Formulating a budget in such a way is a monumental effort that no donor’s government would ever dream of attempting.

Perhaps my favourite example of thoroughly unsuitable ‘best practise’ was a consultant who visited Malawi to make recommendations on how the budget should be classified. Fresh from a trip to Australia where he had been impressed by the ability of government to revise its forecasts when the price of diesel changed by a cent, he proposed that Malawi needed to further disaggregate the budgeting for fuel down into petrol, diesel, paraffin etc. What made this observation particularly startling was that it came:

  1. During a 3 day black-out in the Ministry, with a generator unable to cover for the grossly over-stretched national grid.
  2. In a building where there are no light switches – all of them are either ‘on’ or ‘off’

I could not help thinking that when it comes managing of government’s energy resources we had bigger problems on our hands than refining our diesel forecasts.

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Public or Private Questions

Aug 25

Posted by Matt in Development, Governance | 6 Comments

There’s a good article by Tim Harford in the FT on different accountability structures facing public and private social services, and on why the poor often go with the latter.

It reminded me of a day last year, when I was living in Malawi, when my young housekeeper Mary suddenly got quite ill. I piled her and her best friend into my car and took off to the Lilongwe Central, the biggest free, government-run hospital in the city.

When I parked outside, Mary spoke:

“Wait, take me to the ABC Clinic.”

This was the clinic for for the African Bible College, which charged non-members for medical care.

“But Mary,” I said, “The treatment is free here.”

“I’ll have to wait here,” she said. “Take me to the ABC please.”

After arriving, Mary asked for a loan for 2,000 kwatcha, about $14 , to pay for the consultation and treatment. At the time I was astonished that she chose the large premium (20% of her monthly salary!)  over free.

Harford ends the article with a rather ambiguous statement:

By all means let’s work out how to make government facilities more accountable, in order to provide better education for the world’s poor. But we should also investigate how low-cost private services could be nurtured.

For a change I’ll end with questions rather than assertions: Are these two goals complements, or supplements (for both health and education)? I’ve got a friend who is starting a low-cost private education franchise in the slums of Nairobi. He already has fantastic results and it looks to be an intervention worth making – but then again it does nothing to improve a stagnating government school system.

What are your thoughts?

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Of mice and men

Aug 9

Posted by Matt in Africa, Poverty porn | 3 Comments

Lunch, anyone?

Lunch, anyone?

There’s a very brief article in the Washington post on the Malawian delicacy mice-on-a-stick. I lived there for two years and *somehow* failed to sample it.

What bothers me about the piece is the last sentence:

Malawi, with a population of 12 million, is among the poorest countries in the world, with rampant disease and hunger, aggravated by periodic droughts and crop failure.

This sentence is copied onto the end of every single photo description in the article. It reflects the media’s preferred African stereotype. Yes, Malawi is poor, disease-ridden, and often hungry, but it is really defined by these things? If we’re going to start bringing more dignity to development, we’ll need to start with our newspapers.

America, with a population of 300 million, is one of the fattest countries of the world, with a frighteningly awful perception of poor countries, aggravated by a befuddled, profit-driven media.

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What is ‘poverty porn’ and why does it matter for development?

Jul 1

Posted by Matt in Africa, Poverty porn, Worst practices | 1 Comment

Madonna in Malawi - by Publicity handout/Reuters

Madonna in Malawi - by Publicity handout/Reuters

It was a hot day in mid-summer Lilongwe and my passenger and I were driving towards ‘Old Town,’ the commercial district of Malawi’s capital. The main highway took us through a roundabout overlooked by a gargantuan UNICEF sign promoting their birth certificate registration campaign. The sign featured an extreme close-up of a Malawian toddler, a bland and helpless look on his face and a single tear running down his cheek.

“Look at that,” I said, “Isn’t that awful the way they are using that child to get what they want?”

“Maybe,” said my passenger, “but if it helps them achieve their aim, proper birth registration, isn’t it worth it?”

In one of the very few posts I’ve made so far – and likely often in the future – you’ll see me refer to certain projects or images as being examples of poverty porn. The phrase has been thrown around a lot, and is growing more and more popular. What does it mean and why does it matter? My thoughts on the subject are often not complete and coherent, so keep this in mind while reading!

The first time I became aware of the concept was during the flurry of discussion over the fashion photographer Rankin’s exhibition of photos of DRC refugees. A number of blogs discussed whether or not Rankin’s attempt to shoot refugees as he would celebrities was more or less exploitative than the usual Western portrayals of Africa (for a fantastic discussion of the Rankin photos see The Scarlett Lion and Wronging Rights). Neither SL or WR mention the term “poverty porn,” but I seem to recall learning about it around this time.

As I’ve come to believe, poverty porn, also known as development porn or even famine porn, is any type of media, be it written, photographed or filmed, which exploits the poor’s condition in order to generate the necessary sympathy for selling newspapers or increasing charitable donations or support for a given cause. Poverty porn is typically associated with black, poverty-stricken Africans, but can be found elsewhere. The subjects are overwhelming children, with the material usually characterized by images or descriptions of suffering, malnourished or otherwise helpless persons. The stereotype of poverty porn is the African child with a swollen belly, staring blankly into the camera, waiting for salvation. I ask you to take a look at the image above of Madonna and children from a Malawian orphanage. The photo was part of her campaign to adopt a second child (an interesting analysis of the choice of color here).

There is another use of the term, to describe the glamorizing or beautification of poverty. This meaning was part of a major critique of Danny Boyle’s recent hit Slumdog Millionare, which many felt was wrong to create entertainment out of childhood strife and destitution. Given my definition of poverty porn, I don’t believe Slumdog Millionaire qualifies. I’ll explain why shortly.

Why is poverty porn (as I’ve defined it) so dangerous? As my passenger in my car argued: it serves a purpose. For UNICEF or Oxfam, the use of poverty porn is another tool to garner support for an unquestionably good cause: the reduction of  suffering and poverty. We may be exploiting them to achieve this, but surely the end outweighs the means?

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