Recently there have been renewed calls for a federated government in Malawi. This is an idea which was mooted some years back, championed mainly by the parties that were not in Government then. The idea died down over the past three or four years but has recently been resurrected. Just as the case was before, the main proponents of the idea are politicians who are currently not in Government.
The reasoning behind the proposal is that with each region governing itself, resources will be distributed more equitably among regions than is the case when regions have to depend on Central Government to preside over resource distribution. It is argued that the pattern of resource distribution by Central Government is determined by who is in the Executive, a thinly veiled assertion that the region from which the person at the helm of Government comes gets more than its fair share of the national cake while other regions are treated as less deserving.
This is a type of federated government that places undue emphasis on divisions within a territory. By allowing regions to become autonomous, the country will disintegrate into mini states. Whether the resultant mini states will peacefully co-exist with each other is a story for another day. There is also some likelihood that the autonomous regions will further disintegrate into autonomous districts or ethnic blocks. This is inward looking, the focus shifting from the big entity to several smaller ones. The technical term for this type of governance is not quite federation but federalism.
The federation that a medical doctor-turned-politician vehemently announced that he had come back home to break in 1958 was a different kind of federated governance. This was outward looking, proceeding from small to big. Territories that were initially stand alone were amalgamated to form a bigger territory. The two Rhodesias and Nyasaland became The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland with a joint presidency headed by Roy Welensky in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, whose first deputy was Edgar Whitehead of Northern Rhodesia and second deputy Malcolm Barrow of Nyasaland.
Despite being politically abhorrent, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, or the Central African Federation as it was sometimes called, did, in fact, make a lot of economic sense, as will be discussed later in this article. It was purely for political reasons that Dr. Banda called it “their stupid federation” and was more than determined to annihilate it at the earliest opportunity. Dr. Banda had worked temporarily in a hospital at Hartley in Southern Rhodesia when he was a boy and was on his way to South Africa to search for educational opportunities. He was appalled by the dehumanizing manner in which white workers treated black workers and patients at the hospital. When he learnt that the white settlers in Southern Rhodesia were planning to lock his own home country, Nyasaland, and the two Rhodesias into a federation, his immediate fear was that what he had seen happening at Hartley would be extended to Nyasaland. And he was going to have none of it!
Economic opportunities were boosted many times over with the introduction of Federation. A single territory may have constituted a market of maximum three to four million people before the Federation. Our populations were tiny then. When then three territories came together, that figure increased three-fold. Additionally, with Federation came free movement of labour among the three territories, which boosted chances of picking the right personnel for the work that would have contributed to the health of the economy.
Federation, therefore, was a way to boost the economies of the federated territories. Production, retailing, agriculture, extraction and all other types of business were potentially elevated to heights they had never enjoyed before. Put differently, Federation aimed at improving the well-being of the citizens by creating chances for improved economic performance. Whether or not the economic benefits to be had from the Federation would have been equitably distributed among all the citizens is beyond the scope of this article.
By design, Federation, on the one hand, was about enhancing income generation while federalism, on the other, is about cake sharing. How that cake comes about is not the immediate concern of federalism’s proponents. It is simply assumed that there is a national cake which has to be shared equitably.
It is the considered view of this column that we need to do all we can to reintroduce a version of the Central African Federation, incorporating Mozambique too, if not at the political certainly at the economic level. The intention to ease entry requirements for Malawian and Zambian citizens travelling between the two countries is, therefore, a keenly welcome development.