Recently, the World Bank made the suggestion that the power tariff in this country should be revised upwards so that the service providers can gain the capacity to expand the power sector. This is a suggestion that made a lot of financial sense, from a capitalist perspective, but was met with a great deal of negativity by local commentators.
The Consumers Association, for example, did not hide its displeasure at the World Bank suggestion, arguing that Malawians could not afford a hike in the power tariff when they were already grappling with high fuel prices and sky-rocketing prices of basics such as soap and cooking oil.
What makes sense in one situation may not necessarily make sense in a different situation. The Mathematics and the economics behind the (in)famous suggestion from World Bank may be correct but would not be applicable to our situation.
What is of paramount importance in Malawi is to migrate the majority of our people from the serious poverty they wail in to some semblance of financial stability. Only then can we start talking about implementing decisions that make capitalist sense.
Our model of development should not be the West, where principles of Capitalism are deeply entrenched, and have been for hundreds of years. Rather, let us turn to the East, to China, India, Malaysia, Thailand and to Brazil where we will be able to get models that approximate very closely to our own situation.
One of the issues that tore the cabinet of 1964 apart was whether Malawians should be made to pay for medical services in public facilities. A payment of 3 pence (tickey), now worth about K2.75, had been proposed. A heated debate ensued within the cabinet, with the youthful ministers vehemently opposing it and the older Prime Minister Banda insisting it should be introduced. The rest is history, but it showed how difficult it would be to implement purely capitalistic ideologies in an economy such as ours.
Poll tax was a perennial problem to many of our adult men. They devised ways of running away from the tax enforcers, sometimes by jumping over high fences. It was discovered that the cost of enforcing poll tax compliance was more than the amount collected in the exercise and so this tax regime was abandoned.
We have for decades tried to copy the techniques that have worked in Western countries hoping they would work here and bring about the much sought after development. Many of them simply have not worked because our situation is so different from that in Western countries. People would not spend sleepless nights over poll tax in the West, for example. This is so because the great majority of them earn monies that, by our standards, are handsome.
In my youth at Nkhoma Mission there were several mentally disturbed people that used to frequently visit the Mission. One of them was called Alene. Alene had mastered the art of begging. He would visit people’s homes while singing to the accompaniment of the banging of hoe heads against each other. People knew well ahead of Alene’s arrival that he was coming and would therefore prepare for him by putting together a few food items, or cash, to be handed to him.
It was rumored that Alene was faking insanity to avoid being pestered poll tax enforcers. When you engaged him intensively, it was quite clear that he was indeed of a sound mind.
The models we should adopt are those that are poor-friendly. Poverty is probably our biggest single problem and must be dealt with at every opportunity. Adopting Western models has clearly not helped us. We need to study how our colleagues, those who were in a similar situation to us not too long ago, pulled themselves out of poverty.
Whatever models we adopt need to be modified to suit local conditions, rather than applied wholesale. In economics, “one size fits all” rarely works. Each country is unique and needs to develop unique solutions to its problems even though such solutions might be based on borrowed models.
True to the spirit of this column, I would like to suggest that we should always search within our people, our culture and our history so that we are able to develop and implement suitable, home made, solutions to our problems. When he went out to confront the Philistine giant, Goliath, the Biblical David refused to wear armory gear. He preferred instead to wear what he had always worn, because he knew that he would be more comfortable in his own clothes than in the borrowed ones. We will be comfortable with models from countries that resemble us.