Strategic plan for Malawi

 

At the moment there is no ideology in the Malawian government, neither in opposition. The parties have no clear distinct direction.

While every NGO, up to the small ones, has a strategic plan developed, the country lacks any kind of strategic planning. Every political party should have its strategic plan. It should outline where the country should be going according to the ideology of the party.

For an NGO 5 years may be enough for a strategic plan, for a country this is only middle term strategy. The strategic plan should involve at least 10 years, the time a President can sit in office if reelected (which miraculously seems to always be the case [except when sexism prevents a lady from getting second term]).

It should outline how the party feels the country should be organized in 10 years time (or even longer).

Should education be government funded so everyone can access it independently of their parents’ wealth or should it be privately funded to not burden the tax payer with it?

Health care: Should it be privately funded with a health insurance (and those who have no insurance can die?) or should it muddle along the same track it does now with shortages of everything, most notably drugs? Or should it be improved with government funding, and where is that funding going to come from?

The economy: should government privatise para-statals or keep control? Should government start companies like the Salima sugar factory or leave this to the private sector? Should government unbundle and privatise ESCOM? Should the investment climate be improved with deregulation, or should government tightly regulate the private sector? Should government diversify agriculture (and if yes how?)? Or should this be left to individual entrepreneurs? Should government get involved in irrigation or leave this to the private sector?

Should land be privatized further along the liberal lines that minister Muluzi is currently doing?

Should the Chiefs be abandoned in the long term, or empowered? Should they be elected democratically or should they be appointed by government, or by families? Should they be government funded? What responsibilities should they have? Only ceremonial as custodians of culture, or should they have judicial saying? Should they deal with land policy and how does that relate to Muluzi’s new land bill?

Should corruption be strongly attacked and how? (The President has just declared he does not know how to fight corruption! I wrote about that a long time ago with actionable recommendations!)

Any other important subject? We should have a strategic plan as a country and every political party should outline theirs to show us what we are voting for or against

MCP flops!

The MCP threatens with civil disobedience. Has some MCP person read my earlier writings?

Well, maybe my writing was not clear enough, because this threat is going nowhere. If you want to push government in a certain direction you need to back it up with a credible threat. In this case MCP threatens unspecified “civil disobedience” which must “make the country ungovernable in a peaceful way”. This is not credible. To make the country ungovernable in a peaceful way, you need a big action of many, many people. But MCP wants electoral reforms. These may (or may not) be important, it is not the sort of issue that you get huge crowds over. Most people do not care that much about electoral reforms that they will go out on the streets, risk inconvenience and in the worst case their life (think of the DPP governments use of live ammunition on 20 July 2011, with which they murdered 20 unarmed demonstrators). You need to create action preparedness in the population for your threat to be credible. You need issues that the population really feels strongly about, not some office ideas about electoral reforms. You need something that touches directly on people’s livelihood. Like Mahatma Gandhi’s salt marches. Like Dr Martin Luther King’s bus boycotts, and coffee shop integration projects. Ever rising prices are a good one, or corruption at roadblocks, government offices. Missing drugs, teachers not getting paid. That type of thing. But these MCP types are ruling class, just like government, They think of elite problems, not of the population’s plight. Because their thinking is ruling class. Because they are part of the cultural hegemony of the ruling class. If they want to become activist, they will have to study cultural hegemony,  mix with the poor, find out where the real issues are, and apply cultural hegemony to the local situation. But they cannot do that, because it goes against their interests to really support popular empowerment. MCP is ruling class, and they will never become activist. They should stop pretending, and leave activism to the activists.