REGIONALSIM AND THE UNIVERSITY IN MALAWI

LETTER TO MY BELOVED STUDENT

Dear Ephraim Nyondo,

Your letter is more than eloquent, and I was struck speechless over the last two days of my silence. I am delighted you have come of age enough to see, as you say in your email, the Chancellor College demonstrations for and against University Quota System selection had regionalism fanning the furnace of the cause.

My response is, yes, regionalism is a time-ticking bomb in Malawi. It is time to warn ourselves before we relapse into the recent Kenyan and Rwandan mayhem and bloodbaths still dripping in our memory. The youth need the right and honest education that sets the right frame of mind, NOW more than ever!

It also sickens me a lot to see intellectuals who should have liberated your generations from these prison walls of regionalism themselves steeped deep in baying for the blood of those who want it erased. There are those who practice regionalism in very silent and crafty means, and there are those who are condemned and crucified for naming the practice in public. As a result, we are forbidden from speaking of it in public while its cancer slowly spreads to our tumours of reason, spreading into our intellectuals and spreading into our young intellectuals. Who will save us? Who will teach us the right path?

At the height of MCP rule, we practically sidelined Northerners and practically told "you" to go back to the North. Professionals, teachers in particular, were sent to their regions. The perception was that Northerners are rouble-rousers and trouble makers. The area was neglected in development and the result was that people from the North started looking for ways of self-assertion.

When some brave Chancellor College students protested in the famous "Come Come And Mend" poem (which meant the Chitukuko Cha Amayi Mmalawi -- CCAM) had to come and clean the mess they had left at Chantunga Ground after one of their functions, John Tembo was Chairman of the University Council and was resolved not only expelling the poets (banishing them from the Republic in a Platonic fashion), but he was also ready to cut out all students from the North from the University of Malawi on account that they too were the rouble-rousers.

When Chakufwa Chihana came, he led a national political party which was quickly folded into the bedroom of the North. Throughout the Muluzi times, political parties became regional football clubs, with minimal political inter-marriages. Our voter behaviour can certainly testify.
Up until now, a Chewa will not easily be allowed to marry in the North by cultural perceptions of norms and we have slowly looked at our Northern in-laws with suspicion here in the Central and South.

Even the Livingstonia and Nkhoma Synods have been divided over what has serious religious overtones. When an entire congregation in the Chewa Central Region decides to sing its hymns in Tumbuka because it because this branch belongs to Livingstonia Synod, a nasty head of regional identity has reared out in a wrong place – hasn’t it?

With all the massive effort the Roman Catholic Church has demonstrated worldwide in establishing education, more so demonstrably in Malawi, the Catholic University of Malawi is failing to take off because (what every honest Malawian will tell you) the Catholic (universal) Church does not want to support the regionalistic spirit that is budding in the administration of the university. That university is literally crawling, with only a ream of paper for the survival of an entire department per month once. Part-time teachers have been known to be Head of Departments there. If you studied a subject up to Third Year a the University of Malawi, you are allowed to teach it at the Catholic University of Malawi even if you never specialised therefore. The tuition is rising, and Government has not yet recoginsed them. What happens to those who are about to graduate without any recognition on the market place?

There have been efforts to limit regional-based access to resources of course. The selection from Primary to Secondary School is already premised on a Quota System principle because every district is meant to have Government secondary schools that draw from the district as its education catchment area and these schools are supposed to relate the population sizes of the district, at least on the premise of this principle. This was meant to ensure that every district accesses secondary school education as part (just part) of spreading development.

Some of us are totally confused with the reasoning those (even intellectuals) that refuse the same principle being already applied at our Primary-into-Secondary School level national-wide. Yet, when this debate popped up at Chancellor College Academic email forum, the reasons became very clear. Even those academics you would have wished to admire clearly and openly said the North is benefiting from the present system and they are not ready for any reversals. I am saying this because the pro- and against arguments were equally divided on regional identities and THIS IS ON RECORD of the emails that circulated at that time. Not the type of debates I jump in, and I wrote no single email on that. This is the thinking we seem to have given our students, and this a generation of Malawi who should be challenged to build ONE MALAWI.

What is also on record is that the present system of intake is very preferential and differentially baffling. The data is available at the University Office and with a good number of your lecturers. When you compare district population sizes against the total number of Malawians selected for the University in 5 years, in my humblest words, it sobers you up. You begin to say, "wait a minute!" Is this the Malawi my generation wants to build? Really?

I must conclude by repeating that there are those who practice regionalism, and there are those who are demonised for saying so in public. I will not be surprised if this letter finds its way in the hands of those who will crucify me because they refuse to hear the truth.

But as long as I am a poet, I will take the truth to the public places. So long as I write, I will serve truth at the dinner of those who dance to lies. Above all, I have always cared to say these things to those students whom I love and care about, like yourself because it is upon your generation to cure what our ancestors made worse.

This is what I say to my beloved students like you: WE HAVE NO MORAL REASON TO LIVE THE WRONGS OF OUR FOREFATHERS WHILE WE CANNOT.

From the deep wells of flowing love,
Bright