Q & A

It is time to do politics of development—Analyst

Chingaipe: The sunk costs are significant
Chingaipe: The sunk costs are significant

One of the critical challenges facing the country’s journey to development has been the tendency by presidents to discontinue development projects started by their predecessors. EPHRAIM NYONDO talks to Dr Henry Chingaipe on the effects of this on Malawi’s development.

Q: What has been your observation in as far as the continuation of projects from one political administration to another is concerned?

A: The observation on public policy and programme discontinuities is valid. To some extent, it should be expected because in a democracy, political parties and presidents will ordinarily have competing approaches for delivering social and economic development. In this regard, a change in government through the ballot signals the wish of the people to change policy positions and programme designs that may have become unpopular. However, there are also continuities across the presidencies and regimes. One example is the programme that aims at providing agricultural inputs to smallholder farms. While there have been a few modifications to this programme as reflected in its changing names (starter pack, Targeted Input Programme, Farm input Subsidy Programme), the gist of it has remained the same despite public calls to call off the programme because it does not seem to deliver the desired dividends. However, the discontinuities are not too many but for the few that are worrisome, the sunk costs are significant and that is why as a country we have to start thinking a little more seriously about this issue.

Q: What could be some of the factors behind the tendency?

A: The single most important explanation for this tendency since 2004 is narrow, patrimonial politics through which our presidents have sought to project images of being either ‘a big man’ or ‘a big woman’. This orientation to power and authority drives presidents to cultivate, deepen and broaden their political legitimacy by creating their own programmes imprinted with their personal tags. The motives for this are varied. In some cases, the discontinuity is used to symbolise change. The severity of the discontinuity may also be informed by personal attitudes and relations between the predecessor and successor presidents. For example, the relationship between presidents Muluzi and Mutharika sank to the lowest ebb when Mutharika ditched UDF. In that environment, Mutharika should not have been expected to go ahead with a Muluzi-branded Blantyre District Hospital which was being sponsored by the Libyans. Mutharika actually killed off the project completely when his government severed diplomatic relations with Libya which Muluzi had worked so hard to establish. In short, the hospital project is a victim of political egos of the concerned presidents.

Similarly, President Joyce Banda, instead of simply giving the Presidential Initiative on Greenbelt a new lease of life with her personal touch, she has evidently found it politically unacceptable to maintain the hype. Meanwhile, it is JB’s initiatives that are getting better allocations.

I can safely argue, without fear of contradiction, that a pattern is emerging in which successor presidents attempt to deconstruct the legacy of predecessor presidents while trying to project their own ‘bigness’ and they have found discontinuity of personally branded projects of the predecessors to be one easy way of doing this.

Q: What impact does this have on the country’s development?

A: There are a number of implications in so far as the trajectory of development is concerned. Unfortunately, they are negative. The first one is what is called sunk costs. These are resources—money, time, forgone opportunities, etc, that we incur as a country through the initial investments that are later abandoned even before they have started bearing results. The second is that there is a duplication of efforts and resources, especially when similar initiatives are left to run alongside each other. Given that we are perennially short on resources, we should be focussing on maximising the benefits from the few resources available rather than engaging in ego-massaging projects that quickly turn into sunk costs in a matter of few years or months. Lastly, the tendency effectively means that as a country, our development priorities change significantly while in mid-gear. We cannot achieve long-term development results when our priorities are subjected to personal whims of presidents entirely and especially their short time horizons because they are more concerned with the next election or quickly creating a legacy of some kind. In the end, our journey to socio-economic transformation is at a snail’s pace.

Q: Do you think as a country we have the capacity to stop this tendency?

A: Yes. We can stop this growing madness if we change the way we do politics in this country. A big chunk of our politics constrains our society’s potential and ability to spur development. We need a political system that can foster a shared ideology of development among private sector, bureaucrats, political players across their divide, civil society and the productive workforce in the rural areas. A shared ideology of development will essentially entail a political settlement through which all development programmes will have to fit the bill and the need for discontinuities and haphazard creation of new initiatives will have to undergo a thorough scrutiny. It can no longer be part of the so-called prerogatives. Secondly we need a political culture that can generate what is called ‘developmental leadership’. Developmental leadership is not about the characteristics of individual leaders and is not necessarily shorthand for simplistically linking any desirable, social, economic and political outcomes to the behaviour and attributes of individual leaders. It is about how to deliver socially desirable developmental outcomes. It describes a political process of organising and mobilising people and resources in pursuit of clear collective developmental goals in a given institutional matrix of authority, legitimacy and power with a long time horizon.

Q: Any last words?

A: Changing the players of the political game in the way we have been doing since 1994 without changing the informal rules and practices of the political game itself, will keep this country in a state of under development for many decades to come. It is time to do politics of development.

 

 

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