Is the Hoe a Symptom of Poverty?

On July 11 the Malawi media carried a story that the Civil Society Agriculture Network (CISANET) was organizing a national conference entitled “Malawi Agriculture at 50”. Explaining the reasons for the conference, a spokesman of CISANET said, “Malawi agriculture remains underdeveloped 50 years after independence as evidenced by the continued use of hand hoes for tillage by the majority of the country’s smallholder farmers. A hand hoe remains the primary farm equipment in an era where technology drives production processes”.

The conference was held on July 30 and 31. Reading news reports of the conference, I was impressed by the list of speakers. There were agriculture professors, a cabinet minister, and prominent economists. But my thoughts keep coming back to the statement made by the CISANET spokesman. I had never thought of the simple hoe as a symptom of all that is wrong with Malawi agriculture. You can extend this by stating that the hoe is a symptom of Malawi poverty because subsistence agriculture is very closely tied to the wellbeing of Malawians.

Let me paint a picture of life in rural Malawi for those who are not familiar with subsistence farming. About 80 percent of Malawians live in rural areas. Most of these rural Malawians rely on subsistence farming. This means a family has about one or two acres (roughly half to one hectare) of farm land. The family buys several hoes and fixes each to a wooden handle. Some areas of Malawi prefer to till while bent at the waist so they make hoe handles that are about one meter or shorter while others till standing so their hoe handles are two meters or longer.

When I was young in the 1970s and 1980s, we used to wake up at 4 a.m. with each family member carrying a hoe on the shoulder to go farming. Our farmland was about two miles from home. On a school day we would farm until around 7 a.m. and then go to school. On a weekend or holiday day we would farm until around 4 p.m. The actual farming work depended on the season. The hardest work was making ridges. The practice was to dig last year’s ridges and turn them into troughs between new ridges with last year’s troughs becoming new ridges. Maize (corn) or groundnut (peanut) or bean seeds would then be planted on the new ridges. The seed was either from the previous year’s harvest or purchased from the agriculture shop.

Over the years there have been several efforts by the Malawi government to ease the tilling work of the subsistence farmer. In the 1960s, the Malawi government noted that there were many cattle in rural Malawi. Farmers were encouraged to purchase ox-drawn ploughs. But ploughs turned out to be too expensive for the majority of farmers. Besides, not everybody had cattle.

The biggest effort targeted at reducing hand farming came with a World Bank funded project called Lilongwe Land Development Programme (LLDP). This was a very big project that covered most of Lilongwe throughout the 1970s. The project encompassed many sectors of life including agriculture, shopping centers, health centers, instruction centers, land demarcation, and even building roads and bridges. The idea was to transform rural Lilongwe into communities centered at small towns called units. The rural economies would then operate as cooperatives. Each unit would have most machinery that farmers need and also provide a loan program. If a farmer needed a diesel driven tractor to plough land, they would rent one from the unit and plough his/her land. Viewed from a child’s eyes the LLDP project was very successful. However, my reading later revealed that the project was successful only in its initial years but was a failure overall. One thing I remember is that it did very little to influence the use of the hand hoe for farming. Very few people bothered to rent the agricultural equipment at the unit.

When World Bank funding of LLDP came to an end, the Malawi government negotiated further funding to turn it into a national program called the National Rural Development Programme (NRDP). Thus LLDP was like a pilot project. Under NRDP, the country was divided into eight development divisions. The one in Lilongwe became Lilongwe Agricultural Development Division. Farmers in rural areas were supposed to meet with an extension expert twice a month to learn new farming methods. People who were committed to these meetings received farming loans. But only wealthy farmers signed on to this commitment. Most rural farmers continued using the simple hoe and never joined the groups that met the experts.

Modern efforts have been introduced in this millennium to replace the NRDP. All systems either have limited success or are failures. Fifty years after independence we are still talking about subsistence farmers using hoes for their tilling.

Malawi is going through a midlife crisis. She is asking herself, “What have I done in the 50 years of my independence?” Many have written to point fingers at what or who is to blame for Malawi’s failure to rid herself of poverty. Some blame the laziness of Malawians. I disagree with this assertion. Others blame the lack of visionary leaders. But some of the leaders were very visionary to the extent that we ridiculed their “dreams”. Yet others blame corruption. Whereas Malawi has become more corrupt than before, my suspicion is that corruption itself if a symptom of a deeper problem. I will write a rebuttal of these diagnoses at another time. Most commentators are not identifying the actual problem. They all know there is a problem of poverty but they don’t agree on its causes. It follows that a solution to the problem cannot be identified.

It would be presumptuous of me to suggest that I succeeded in finding the problem that more intelligent people have failed to find. But many problems in rural Malawi are rooted on the fact that people do not store enough food and harvest in years of plenty for use when lean years come. As a nation whose majority relies on subsistence farming, Malawi is vulnerable to famine arising from droughts. I am not stating anything new here. It was in an attempt to solve this problem that Malawi built food storage facilities. In addition to these facilities, there is a commission for disaster preparedness. The only problem is that, for some reason, people still die of hunger in drought years. Either the storage facilities are never used or the preparedness is not done.

Jeff Sachs wrote in his book “The End of Poverty” that a nation gets out of poverty when it has 80 percent of its population in urban areas and 20 percent in farming. Of course, the few farmers need machinery to feed the many people who live in towns. Using a hoe cannot do. By this metric Malawi’s situation is dire.

Is the hoe a symptom of poverty? No. Manual work is not a symptom of poverty. Thousands of people do manual work in China. Due to cheap labor accrued from such manual work, many corporations in the western hemisphere are moving their manufacturing operations to China. The fact that rural people do manual work is not in itself a symptom of poverty. The lack of supporting industries, facilities, and structures for the farmer is a symptom, and probably cause, of poverty.      

Tragedy of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the Future of BRICS

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down in Ukraine yesterday. All 298 people on board the Boeing 777 were killed in the resulting plane crash. It is not yet known as to who is responsible but signs are pointing towards the Eastern Ukraine separatists. Russia supports the separatists in many ways including supplying them with military equipment.

Earlier this week the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) announced the formation of the BRICS Bank. The purpose of the bank is to provide funds in the manner of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The hope is that the BRICS Bank will impose fewer conditions attached to funding. Moreover, it is felt that the Bretton Woods institutions are controlled by western governments and serve the interests of USA, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan.

BRICS is a loose grouping of emerging countries. They are considered emerging because they are experiencing tremendous economic growth despite having not achieved the development levels of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Economic growth brings new challenges.

The relationship between BRICS and North America and Western Europe is nuanced. One of the reasons Western Europe is finding it difficult to punish Russia for interference in Ukraine is that Europe depends on Russia for energy supply. Similarly, USA criticizes China of human rights violations but American corporations are moving their manufacturing plants to China to reduce production costs. Further, American corporations are outsourcing technical support centers and software development to India. Western corporations are investing heavily in Brazil and South Africa.  

BRICS have a growing middle class that has an increasing appetite for consumerism. Resources are needed to feed this consumerism. BRICS are in full drive in developing countries befriending governments by funding projects in exchange for resources. Here are some examples.

Brazil is getting coal from Mozambique and building a railway through Malawi and Mozambique that will be used to transport the coal to the nearest Indian Ocean port en route to Brazil. India is extending credit to Malawi in exchange for exports from India to Malawi. China has built a parliament and a conference center in Malawi and is now building a football stadium and electricity generation stations. In exchange, China is getting different types of minerals from Malawi. South Africa owned companies are building shopping malls in Malawi. In exchange, Malawi buys many products from South Africa. Russia sells military equipment to many African countries including many that were friends of the Soviet Union. Similar relations are being established between the BRICS and many developing countries all over the world.

Developing countries have various leadership types ranging from very democratic to dictatorial. Some of the governments have bad human rights records. Moreover, some of these governments mismanage their funds. BRICS funding is preferred by these governments because it has no strings attached. Funds are made available regardless of poor human rights records, rampant corruption, and currencies that are not aligned to actual trade.

But what is the future of BRICS? Economic growth rates in all BRICS countries have cooled down in recent years. Each of the BRICS countries has hosted major international sporting events recently that resulted in backlash. And now Russia seems to be linked to the shooting of a civilian aircraft. Is the shooting of this plane to Russia what the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie was to Libya? These BRICS problems may derail the lofty goals of BRICS. And if BRICS are unable to achieve their goals then the rest of the developing world may go down with them.

End of innocence: FIFA World Cup and Poverty

Let me start by paying my respects to my mother-in-law who passed away on Tuesday July 1 in Blantyre. Mrs. Lucy-Jesse Nakhomba Manondo was in her early 90s. Thanks to her for giving birth to my beautiful wife Tambudzai and all her sisters and brothers. Above all, I am fortunate that I have never had in-law problems as she loved and accepted me in her home.

Before going into this week’s topic, let me congratulate the Malawi Netball Team for being ranked first in Africa and fifth in the world. Malawi women are outstanding and represent both the country and the continent very well.

On July 6, 2014 Malawi celebrated the 50th anniversary of independence from Britain. Independence celebrations in Malawi always end with a football match between the Malawi Men’s National Football team against another country’s national team. This year’s match was against neighboring Mozambique. It ended in a 1-1 tie. This is a great improvement over the result of the match played 52 years ago whose result was Ghana 12, Malawi 0. But it is a step back from the golden days of the 1970s and 1980s. The Daily Times of Malawi carried a good history of Malawi football on July 6.

The dark days of the 1960s in Malawi football were erased by a Brazilian coach named Wander Moreira who brought the beautiful game to Malawi taking the Malawi team to the final in its very first competitive regional tournament of the Confederation of Eastern and Central African Football Associations (CECAFA) which Malawi lost to Kenya in 1975. Malawi became champion of the tournament two years in a row a few years later under a British coach named Powell. Malawi played the Brazilian brand of football because of Moreira. I grew up loving the Brazil National Team as a result. Although Malawi had no television, I read about mesmerizing plays by the great Brazil teams of 1970 and 1982.

For those of you who are not very familiar with football, there are many brands of the game. In those days especially, different countries had distinct football identities. The Dutch played a type called “total football”. The Spanish adopted the Dutch "total football" and called it “tiki-taka”. The Italian game was the least exciting as it involved the whole team standing near their own goal to prevent conceding goals. The inventors of the game, the English, had a big person standing near the opponent goal and the rest of the team kicked long shots to this big player hoping he will outmuscle the defending team and score. The Germans played efficient business-like football. But the Brazilians played the “beautiful” game. They were creative and artistic as they played. And this is the brand of football that Moreira brought to Malawi.

The years of youth are full of innocence. When one grows up one discovers that the world is not perfect. Heroes become villains. Rich versus poor becomes a divide that prevents people from playing together. The FIFA World Cup is in Brazil this year. The Brazil National Team is not even attempting to play a semblance of the “beautiful” game. Players are rarely playing stylishly. When touched in the slightest, they fall and writhe in false pain to fool the referee into awarding free kicks. They foul the opponents shamelessly. I have to accept that the “beautiful” game is dead. But this death has not happened suddenly.

Brazil spent an estimated 14 billion United States Dollars on the 2014 FIFA World Cup. There were demonstrations all over Brazil prior to the start of the tournament. Many people wondered whether spending such large amounts of money on hosting a major international sports event instead of solving problems of poverty, education, and healthcare is wise. Anybody who has seen pictures of the favelas of Brazil will understand this confliction. Countries that win the bid to host major international sports events always include the misleading information that the event will benefit poor people. But past host countries have not seen benefits accrue to the poor. This is especially true when the host country is not a highly developed country. Recent examples are Athens, Greece 2004 Olympics through Beijing, China 2008 Olympics to South Africa 2010 FIFA World Cup. Is it karma that Brazil’s “beautiful” game has died at a time when Brazil is spending enormous amounts of money at the expense of her poor?

Much as I love football, Malawi needs to prioritize combating poverty and not football. My ambivalence on spending on football arises from the fact that although football has been the poor people’s sports for the past 50 or so years, it is being spoilt by FIFA and other greedy elements. But then I digress. Let me return to the topic of Malawi’s independence. Malawi’s independence is only political as 40% of the country’s budget is funded by foreign governments or institutions. As Malawi celebrates 50 years of independence, there is need to find ways of becoming fiscally independent. A former politician, Sam Mpasu, recently corrected myths and gave clarification on how this independence can be achieved. Only when economic independence is achieved will Malawi take care of its poor.

Follow us on twitter @RobertMChirwa

WHAT DO MALAWI ELECTIONS AND AMERICAN AFFORDABLE CARE ACT HAVE IN COMMON

I know everybody is focused on the FIFA World Cup. This is the best time to sneak in a few lines on the technical side of the Malawi elections. This story starts on the night of May 20, 2014 from the point in the elections when a polling center has finished counting votes and is ready to report them to the national tally center.

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), a software system was developed by Globe Computer Systems and partly funded by UNDP for purposes of submitting results. There was a demonstration of the system on May 14, 2014. The idea was: “… results will be manually aggregated at 4,445 polling stations and delivered to the Constituency Tally Centers in 35 District Headquarters. The data in Tamper Evidence Envelopes will be digitized and transmitted to the National Tally Centre”. My assumption is that this is a Web-based system. The transmitted data would be received by software that would update a database. Those interested in results would just do a web search and voila.

The first tally center to attempt to submit results was unsuccessful. And so was the second and third and the rest of them (I am exaggerating here). The software was not used at all. Instead the results were photocopied and sent by the old-fashioned fax machine. The Electoral Commission Chairman Maxson Mbendera, my former SCOM Chair at Chancellor College, said “Our electronic counting system has crashed, yes, and last night we migrated to our Plan B”.

Then started a long protracted electoral process that led to law suits, political rancor, and sadly one death. What went wrong?

Those of us in software development are all too familiar with these scenarios. This problem is not unique to Malawi. For the American public, a similar system failure happened at the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act in October 2013.

Modern World Wide Web (Internet) based software systems are very complex. They rely on transmission over many different types of media such as telephone lines, cellular wireless antennas, fiber-optic cables, and others. Users use these systems from many different types of computers such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, as well as desktop computers. Moreover, the software used to access Internet-based systems tends to be heterogeneous. Some users prefer Windows while others prefer MacOS. There are those who prefer Internet Explorer and those who swear by Firefox.

The most difficult aspect of Internet-based systems is to anticipate the number of users. This affects the amount of data traffic and communication connection requests. Many times such systems are tested with a few users and they work. Unfortunately such tests do not simulate real life situations. Crashing is the only language the system knows when overwhelmed. 

The answer to this problem is called Load Testing or Stress Testing. The Electoral Commission should have had a day when a high volume of requests were generated for the system. But this was probably not adequately done. What we need in the world are better and competent Software Engineers. 

Lessons from Malawi 2014 elections

The main lesson from the May 20, 2014 presidential, parliamentary, and local elections in Malawi is that there is no change. Voters in Malawi cast votes on a regional basis. There were four major candidates. Peter Mutharika of the DPP swept the Southern Region, Atupele Muluzi of UDF swept the Eastern Region, Lazarus Chakwera of MCP swept the Central Region, and Joyce Banda of PP swept the Northern Region. Parliamentary and local voting patterns were similar. The overall winner was Peter Mutharika.

Joyce Banda is an interesting case because she comes from the Eastern Region. However, her husband Richard Banda is from the Northern Region.

The Southern Region is the most populous region of Malawi. The past five multiparty presidential elections in Malawi since 1994 have been won by a candidate from the Southern Region. At this point conventional wisdom should tell us that the major presidential candidate from the Southern Region should win the elections. So why were the 2014 results surprising?

There were several factors that most pundits assumed would play a role in deciding the winner. The first was simply that the incumbent, Joyce Banda, should be favored to win. The second was that there were three major candidates, including the incumbent, from the Southern Region which would result in splitting the Southern vote. This would have two possible effects. One scenario was that the candidate from the Central Region would benefit. The second scenario was that the candidate from the Southern Region who also carried the Northern Region would carry the day. The third was the freshness of Lazarus Chakwera. For the first time in Malawi politics there was a candidate not imbued with past political controversies.

These assumed factors did not have the assumed effect, at least not to the level that would affect the outcome. The surprise was that the outcome was business as usual.

Going forward, political parties whose main following is not in the Southern Region will need to come up with new strategies. One possible strategy is to field a candidate from the Southern Region. The parties should be cautioned that just fielding a Southern candidate is not adequate. Joyce Banda is from the South but the perception was that she is from the North. The Southern Region electorate must embrace the candidate as one of their own for such a candidate to have a chance of winning. The problem with this strategy is that it condemns all non-Southern candidates from ever winning the presidency.

A second possible strategy is to form credible coalitions. A candidate from either the Northern Region or the Central Region standing on a ticket of the party that has a large following in those respective regions needs to peel off Southern support. Again parties should be cautioned that voters abandon their own regional party when they sense that the leader is betraying them by teaming up with a rival.

The third strategy is one that I hope will be fulfilled one day. That the main political parties will become truly national. My hope is that elections will be contested competitively from north to south and from east to west by multiple political parties. I hope such a day will be hastened.