Year in Review 2005 - Signs of hope after a troubled year

After a year of living dangerously, Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika and the opposition might sit down to negotiate a way out of their tense standoff in 2006, say analysts. "President Mutharika has indicated that he is willing to sit down at the table and talk," said Boniface Tamani, chairman of the Public Affairs Committee (PAC), an interfaith democracy monitoring group that has been trying to negotiate a peace pact between the two sides. In a televised New Year's address last week, Mutharika remarked, "I am ready to talk to any members of the opposition whose agenda is to move forward ... I am ready even to forgive them." A power struggle between Mutharika and his predecessor, Bakili Muluzi, who leads the United Democratic Front (UDF), resulted in politicians from either side spending a large part of 2005 trading threats and insults. Mutharika fell out with Muluzi after he quit the UDF, which had sponsored him as the party's presidential candidate in the 2004 general elections. Unhappy with Mutharika's refusal to appoint corruption-tainted ministers to his cabinet, the UDF leadership was preparing to oust him from the party, but "before they could do that he decided to quit", explained Hetherwick Ntaba, spokesman for the president's newly formed Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). "Muluzi had probably assumed that he could use [Mutharika] as a rubber-stamp president," commented Ntaba, who also serves as health minister. But the tables were turned and there are "certain questions surrounding certain deals associated with the former president", that are under investigation. The UDF responded to the anti-corruption drive with an impeachment charge, accusing Mutharika of using US $300,000 of public money to launch the DPP. The opposition parties, the largest bloc in parliament, managed to stall the functioning of the house at a time when Malawi was facing its worst drought in a decade, compounded by the late delivery of fertilisers and seed. According to aid agencies, up to five million Malawians need food assistance until April this year. The impeachment motion also derailed the approval of the country's budget in June 2005, causing concern in the donor and humanitarian communities, who were gearing up to respond to the emergency. In an extraordinary move, the donor community wrote to Malawian political leaders voicing their concern over the impeachment proceedings when the country was experiencing a "serious and prolonged food crisis". Mutharika won some breathing space when a court ruling stalled the impeachment until the constitutional court could determine the legality of the process. The PAC stepped in to open a channel of communication between the warring sides but the budget was stalled again when the opposition, responding to criticism about its lack of interest in the food security situation, urged the government to offer a universal fertiliser subsidy. As the crisis gathered momentum, the government gave in to the opposition's demands and agreed to subsidise fertilisers to small-scale maize and forex-earning tobacco farmers across the board. About a month later, unable to cope with the costs involved, the authorities replaced the universal fertiliser subsidy programme with a coupon system, giving a limited number of subsistence producers access to fertilisers at half the commercial price. A recent USAID-commissioned report, 'The Governance Dimensions of Food Security in Malawi', highlighted similar inconsistencies in the Mutharika administration's stand on universal fertiliser distribution last year, which has been partly responsible for the current food shortages. Mutharika promised subsidised fertilisers in the run-up to the May 2004 elections, but distribution, only began in January last year - too late for farmers who had begun planting in November 2004. In October the opposition lobbied the government to declare a state of disaster to enable the state to better deal with the emergency. It has been a precarious year for Mutharika, keeping the opposition at bay and ensuring the loyalty of his members of cabinet drawn from various political parties. Any member caught displaying closeness to either Muluzi or Mutharika, found himself out of the UDF or the cabinet respectively. The politics of confrontation marked 2005, noted analyst Rafiq Hajat, director of the Institute for Policy Interaction, who feared a continuation of the "tit-for tat" situation between the president and the house in 2006. However, the by-election success last month of Mutharika's DPP, in which it took all six contested seats from the UDF, might enable Mutharika to stop "ignoring parliament and take an interest in its functioning", suggested Dulani. The polls were held to fill seats left vacant following the death of five MPs in the last 18 months and the conviction of another. The DPP's victory was "a sign that Mutharika has a support base" among the public, noted Dulani. After months of bitter acrimony, pressure from NGOs and the donor community within and outside Malawi had begun to bear fruit. Mutharika is willing to negotiate, but not without conditions. "I am not afraid of impeachment; I am not weak and certainly not desperate ... however, in order to create a more favourable environment for fruitful dialogue, the opposition must unconditionally withdraw impeachment from the agenda in parliament," he said last week. The UDF responded that they were willing to talk if Mutharika worked on improving relations with parliament. The fact that both sides were laying down conditions was welcomed by Tamani. "At least they did not shut the door. No one has said they do not want any dialogue - they have in fact laid the basis to begin negotiations." Mediation efforts outside Malawi have also been underway. Two weeks ago Muluzi and John Tembo, leader of the largest opposition party, the Malawi Congress Party, returned from a meeting initiated by the Global Leadership Foundation, an NGO based in South Africa. UDF spokesman Sam Mpasu said the details were being kept under wraps for the moment. "It is a beginning - last year Mutharika was not willing to even talk to the opposition."