"Look Yonder! A Big Black Cloud Come!"

A prize to anyone who gets this week's titular reference.

Just when we were starting to get worried, the sky opened and the rains fell. Not the biblical deluge I’d been hoping for, but rain nonetheless. Only time will tell if the rainfall this year is enough to produce the bumper crops we desperately need. It’s certainly brightened up Lilongwe a bit – the flowers are a bit more plentiful, grass slightly greener and birds in just slightly better voice.

Or maybe that’s just how things seem to me. The project I’m working on seems to be making enough progress to have a tangible effect on our most important set of IMF targets, and this is no small event. Failure to meet these targets could seriously damage the economy by preventing us from accessing millions of dollars of debt relief.

We’ve been working pretty strenuously these last 48 hours to get our side of the work complete, and now the ball is in the donors’ court. I have to say that since I’ve arrived here, my estimation of most donor agencies has been falling by the day. We’ve been trying to set up a system of obtaining information on donor’s spending projections and the actual amounts they’ve disbursed to us. This is vital information. Almost all of our debt relief targets are dependent on our ability to secure such funding, so obviously having an idea of how much donors are planning to release is pretty useful. I rather naively assumed that donors would be only too willing to provide this sort of information to us. After all, knowing how much money we can access by meeting project conditions is a powerful spur to action for a cash strapped ministry. We recognise that a lot of our projects have stalled due to problems of our own creation. The information we’re after will help us identify where the biggest problems are and hopefully correct them. And surely that’s what the donors want, right?

This project has made me think that maybe they don’t actually want us to make this kind of progress. There is simply no other way of explaining how much effort these donors make to obfuscate the issue. A colleague (from one of the largest donor agencies) gave me a pretty good explanation as to why this might be the case. When a donor government pledges $50 million to Malawi, this gets splashed across the papers (alright, it gets a small article on page 7 of the Guardian – but the point is, they get the kudos for helping out a poor LDC). Once this money has been pledged, however, it isn’t normally just sent out to the Ministry of Finance to distribute via the budget, which is by far the best way of coordinating government activity. Usually, and quite understandably, they release the funds in segments. These segments are normally contingent on specific actions on projects being undertaken, for example, production of a detailed plan of action for setting up a microfinance initiative. If we at the Malawi government don’t hold up our end of the bargain, the money never comes to us, and the same money can then be spent by the donor on another country, generating another positive headline without actually spending any extra money.

I should hasten to add that the most of the donor agency staff in country don’t seem to be this cynical. They want the money to get through to the projects and help people in this country. They are, however, wary of being named and shamed for the poor disbursement records of their own headquarters (be it a government or international organisation). The upshot is that the information that was almost certainly produced last year has been mysteriously misplaced. We’ll have to work with projections for the future and try and build an understanding of how we can improve our own performance over the next year or two.

Ach. I’m turning into a cynic. Hopefully my Christmas trip to Liwonde national park with Snowball will cheer me up.

“Who knows? Not me. We never lost control…”

Looking over a list of the foreign loans that the Government of Malawi is currently paying off, and it really is striking how uncoordinated it all seems to be. Fragmentation of donor agencies and government ministries has led to a proliferation of useful projects without much thought as to what combination of activities will have the greatest impact when taken as a package.

Part of the problem is that while we know what outcomes we want to achieve, we don’t have a clear visualisation of what changes the economy and society will have to go through to achieve them. We all know we’re after ‘development’, and we want life expectancy to increase, infant mortality to decrease, and quality of life generally to improve. We know we want food security, and higher literacy. What we haven’t asked is what kind of society and economy will be most adept at achieving these ends. At the moment, the development community is operating on the assumption that the basic economic and social structure doesn’t need to change: if we privatise or improve access to credit, and build more schools, things will improve.

Is this really the case? What good will microfinance do in a region where everyone owns a small plot of land? They’ll be able to purchase fertiliser, but can farmers mechanise when their plots are too small to make a tractor worth the cost of upkeep? How can they rotate crops or diversify in a farm only large enough to support one crop? And when smallholder farming predominates there isn’t much potential employment for the young men who don’t inherit land. They instead move to the cities, where worklessness is already a big problem. It might be that the only way to generate the potential for growth is a move to large scale commercialised agriculture. This wouldn’t be a painless process, but pretty much every developed country has gone through it. Until we’re willing to look at patterns of inheritance and the social and economic barriers to accumulating land, we can’t begin to understand whether this process would help Malawi.

Similarly, it’s assumed that the economy already operates as a functioning capitalism, so simply removing those barriers that prevent capitalist economies from flourishing can stimulate growth. Leaving aside our imperfect understanding of what those barriers are, the premise may well be flawed. The majority of employment in urban areas seems to be family-based, rather than making use of a pool of unattached labour. Of course some industries do unambiguously conform to the capitalist model with its division of asset rich owners and asset poor labourers, with the former paying wages and using mechanised processes to generate profits that increase at a faster rate than wages. What we need to understand is how extensive this model of production is, because our macroeconomic policies assume that it is pervasive. It’s clearly not dominant in agriculture, and if isn’t pervasive in urban areas we need to think about how to make it so, because history has shown it is by far the most dynamic form of economic organisation. If we accept that the economy needs restructuring, we also need to look at what social changes will facilitate these changes and result from them.

I’m not suggesting that these are easy questions to answer, or even to ask. Malawi is a unique country, and the changes we will need to go through won’t be the same as those experienced elsewhere. Nonetheless, until we start asking questions like this, we’re sailing without a compass.

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Another Hoopoe in the Ministry gardens yesterday. Apparently they’re daily visitors, but not visible from my window.

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On the weekend I went to a bottle store (bar) with one of the Ministry drivers to watch the traditional dancing, and saw what can only be described as a reverse minstrel show. After some hours of fantastic performance, the dancers dressed up in white and began to move in unnatural and uncoordinated spasms, unrelated to the beat from the drums. Through the hysterics Cantona explained to me that they were imitating mzungus (white people) dancing. I nearly died laughing.

I’ve also found a school run in one of the poorer parts of Lilongwe that I’ll hopefully be able to help out with on weekends. Last week I ran training session for those students interested in football (i.e. all of them). By the end of the year, one of them will be in the national side, just you wait…

If Not Now, When?

Sorry for the tardiness of this week’s ramble, but things have been hectic these past few days…

Lets start with the economy shall we? With the hot, muggy breath of the IMF Country Mission on our necks, we at the Ministry of Finance have been desperately scrabbling this week to prove that a large part of our underperformance against certain targets is down to the vagaries of donor funding. In particular a couple of large donors have not been disbursing the money we’ve been promised in a timely fashion (i.e., ever). It’s not all their fault; sometimes they attach quite reasonable conditions, for example, demanding the production of a project plan before they pump $20 million into an attempt diversify farming practices in a region. You’d think that this wouldn’t be too difficult to produce in a reasonable timeframe. But you’d be wrong – five years after some of these projects have gone live, not only have we not produced a plan, we haven’t actually recruited anyone to write one! So for five years, we’re paying commitment charges on a loan when the money is sitting in a bank somewhere else, and nothing is actually happening in Malawi. Clearly, this can’t go on, and its one of the things my team is hoping to deal with in the coming months. The PS is keen to see results, so these last days have been long and filled with Excel work, but it’s all very invigorating.

The political situation is equally intriguing. If you recall, a couple of weeks ago, I recounted how a number of senior UDF figures were being arrested on corruption charges after their attempt to impeach Bingu wa Mutharika. Well, late last week, he admitted these arrests were ‘tit-for-tat’. A rather worrying precedent, especially when admitted so openly, but to be honest most of these guys should have been arrested some time ago.

On a personal level, the housing situation is no closer to being resolved, but I’m confident of finding somewhere to live before the new year. Call me foolish.

* * *

The papers outdid themselves this week, reporting the resurrection of a sixteen year old girl, some eleven years after she died, aged five. What’s shocking about these reports are the way they miss the extremely obvious non-religious explanations for what happened. Essentially this girl, aged five, was declared dead by a local hospital, despite claims from local people who had visited her that her body remained warm, and she responded to external stimulation, sometimes in such obvious ways as touching those near her. Her description of ‘death’ is equally problematic. She claims she was led to a farm, run by an unkind couple who used her as slave labour, working the fields, cooking, and so on, with a number of other children working in the same conditions. They were fed one meagre meal each day, and confined to a locked room when not working. Eventually, after some time, she claims that the room where she was held was left unlocked by chance. She escaped and wandered towards town, where she was discovered in the graveyard.

Now, call me a skeptic, but I don’t think this poor girl died. I think the doctors at hospital sold her into slavery and she’s been incredibly lucky and escaped. From her account it appears that there are a number of other children who weren’t so lucky. It’s the height of irresponsibility that the papers are calling this a resurrection and not a crime.

* * *

I saw a Hoopoe outside my office this morning. I love living in a county where such exotic and beautiful birds are found in litter strewn gardens.

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Just heard today about Roy Keane leaving Man U. I thought he’d leave at the end of the season, but still, what a shock that it happened so soon and so suddenly. The guy has a temper that leads him into such trouble. One day he’ll look back on his outburst after the Boro game and regret it.

Dude, where's my house?

It’s been an eventful week. I went to a wedding, met the IMF mission to Malawi and suffered another setback in the struggle to get housed.

I promised last week to explain the slightly cryptic title, so here goes. One of my colleagues in the Ministry of Education (lets call her Snowball) was witness to the minor meltdown of a Japanese civil servant stationed in Malawi and clearly not used to the more, ahem, languid pace at which work tends to be done here. He had spent a good portion of Wednesday being victimized by misfortune and bad organization. The straw that broke the civil servant's back was when he turned up to an important meeting bang on time, only to be told that he had been erroneously directed to the wrong location. The meeting was actually taking place on the other side of Lilongwe. He arrived 30 minutes late. Cue breakdown. He collapsed into Snowball’s room, and seethed: ‘I feel like I’m playing an important game of catch. But I’m the only one who is willing to throw the ball! The other player will catch it, but never throws it back!’ And with that, he exited.

I do have sympathy for the poor guy. I’ve been to a number of meetings where it really has seemed like a random collection of people just wandered in without knowing why they were put in a room together. One of the funniest things I’ve seen this year is an IMF economist struggling to find out how close to our Staff Monitored Program we’ve managed to stay, while simultaneously attempting to open a foil-sealed bottle of orange juice. Eventually he gave up on the SMP, but managed to liberate the orange juice with a sharp pencil repeatedly jabbed through the foil. I’m pretty sure he considered using the same technique on the Reserve Bank President to extract information…

That said the IMF and the donor community in general are far from the paragons of organizational virtue that they seem to think they are. While the IMF incessantly demand information collated and presented to their specifications, trying to find out how much money they’ve actually disbursed to the Government (as opposed to how much they promised) is like drawing blood from a stone. Similarly, last week I was witness to the donor community’s version of a dispute over the billing, with one large donor mounting strenuous objections to a project for no apparent reason beyond the higher profile of another donor on the same project.

My colleagues at the Ministry of Finance, a passionate bunch of civil servants (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms), managed to see the lighter side of this, but I doubt we’ll be laughing if donor ego-clashes derail what could be a really important project for this country.

I’m certainly not laughing after what I was told this afternoon. The house that the Ministry is meant to provide me with may not materialise for quite some time, and I’m starting to suffer serious lodge-fatigue, as much as I like Maurice and the rest of the chaps who work here. Looks like I’ll have to find a house myself and then motivate the ministry to cough up the rent. It's all very frustrating

On a happier note, my driver (Cantona - humour me!) got married on Saturday, and myself, Snowball, and a couple of friends were invited. It all got rather embarrassing when I had to dance around Cantona, throwing money at him, with an audience of a couple of hundred people and a camcorder... They then read out for the entire audience what each of us got him as a gift. Real name-and-shame potential there, but fortunately I was on generous form that day...

"Like playing catch when only one player wants to throw the ball..."

At just over ten years old Malawi’s democracy is still in its infancy, but its key protagonists have been around for a long time. Many of them are in their 60s and 70s, and this in a country where the average life expectancy does not reach 40.

So for those of you not up to date on Malawi’s political situation (for shame): The previous president of Malawi was a man called Bakili Muluzi, leader of the United Democratic Front (UDF) party. Bakili and his buddies had a grand old time in power, amassing extraordinary wealth, much of it of dubious provenance. But the fun had to end some time, and so it came to pass, with the constitution denying Bakili the opportunity to serve a third term. According to one school of thought, Bakili was wary of promoting one of his UDF henchmen to the top post, and instead fished around for an easily controlled stooge to install and rule through. He came up with Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika, who duly won the election on a UDF ticket.

Once he was in power, however, it quickly became apparent that Bingu was no mere stooge. He left the UDF, forming his own Democratic Progress Party (DPP), and launched a stinging attack on corrupt officials, through the snappily titled Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB). Unsurprisingly, the bulldog he unleashed starting sniffing around the UDF, finding something fishy about Bakili and friends. This was the first set of enemies that Bingu made.

The second brings us to Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi Congress Party (MCP), now led by John Tembo, who initially threw their weight behind Bingu’s DPP. Their support enabled Bingu to pass the budget through parliament, but was conditional on one thing: that the proposed subsidy on fertilizer that Bingu wished to provide for small holder and subsistence farmers be made universal, so that fertilizer would be available on the cheap to all. (A completely incidental aside: John Tembo and his MCP cronies are among the largest landowners in Malawi. A universal subsidy would be a considerable boon to the personal fortunes of these men). Bingu, needing to pass a budget to govern the country, not to mention feed the hungry, duly agreed despite the massive cost of such an undertaking.

Now, this being politics, once the budget was passed, Bingu dropped plans for a universal subsidy, citing expense, and accordingly John Tembo realigned his MCP with the UDF, who had been busy drafting guidelines for the impeachment of the President. No sooner had these guidelines been pushed through the house, than specific impeachment procedures were brought against Bingu (for no good reason that can easily be discerned), much to the dismay of the donor community. They have taken an unsurprisingly dim view of the time spent on impeachment debates when a maize shortage is threatening the lives of many of the country’s poor.

And, with the timing a pure coincidence... this week senior UDF figures, including Bakili, found themselves at the centre of an ACB probe.

It’s enough to make one’s head spin. I’ll explain the title next week, it’s getting late, and Lille are beating Man U.