Reconciling Our Past For A Future

By Samuel Junior Mpasu

A brief psycho-political analysis revolving around protectorate and post-protectorate events in which the older Malawian generation participated over half a century ago, and post-protectorate contemporary events the younger Malawian generation are currently experiencing. Reconciling Our Past for A Future forms a mental picture of how past protectorate events shaped the sociocultural, sociopolitical and socioeconomic current state of affairs. Importantly, it offers a fundamental reimagining of how the succeeding generation could be shaping the inherent future. Beginning with a personal narrative and ending with a critical thought-provoking assessment, it reveals how religion, democracy, republic and constitution practically sharpen the characteristic spirit of Malawian culture, politics and economy as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Samuel Junior Mpasu
• Release date: Aug 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005513313

Book preview

Reconciling

Our Past

for a Future

SJ Mpasu

Copyright © 2020 SJ Mpasu

Published by SJ Mpasu Publishing at Smashwords

First edition 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system without permission from the copyright holder.

The Author has made every effort to trace and acknowledge sources/resources/individuals. In the event that any images/information have been incorrectly attributed or credited, the Author will be pleased to rectify these omissions at the earliest opportunity.

Published by SJ Mpasu using Reach Publishers’ services,

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Edited by Susan Hall for Reach Publishers

Cover design by Reach Publishers

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Cover Photocredit to Ed Peeters

SJ Mpasu

[e-mail]

THE UHURU PROJECT, A BRIEF: RELIGION, DEMOCRACY, REPUBLIC AND CONSTITUTION SHAPING A NATION

In honour and memory of

Samuel John Lemoth Mpasu,

My Dad

(17 September 1945 – 12 February 2018)

About the Author

SJ Mpasu is a rural and community development practitioner and a public management alumnus of Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), a signature effort to invest in the next generation of African leaders.

Ours is a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people…Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well…We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all. – Pericles - Greek statesman, orator, and general of Athens during the golden age)

We are all looking for constitutional opportunity. We have discovered that the constitution is not a mechanism that operates by itself; we are a government of people and not law after all. The law has no force without people who are willing to enforce it.

– SJ Mpasu

Table of Contents

Introduction

Future Generations: Attractive and interesting pictures on walls

1. Lessons from Makolo in Rural and Community Development

2. Historical Review Reconciling a Past:

Pre-protectorate to post-state

3. Evolution of the Chiefdom:

Witting apprentices of democracy and republic

4. Federal or Unitary:

Through a socioeconomic outlook

5. LGBTQIA in the Criminal Justice System:

Reviewing provenience of the criminality of sodomy

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Key Sources

Introduction

Future Generations: Attractive and interesting pictures on walls

"One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever."

– Ecclesiastes 1:4

On 24 August 2017, I was selected to participate in the Young African Leaders’ Initiative (YALI) Regional Leadership Centre Southern Africa Programme. There were three tracks that applicants could apply for, based on their current occupation in situ or field of interest: business and entrepreneurship, civic leadership, and public management and governance. As a rural and community development worker, also working for education in procurement-related administration, I had chosen public management and governance.

Along with 16 fellow Malawians and 116 cohorts from across Southern Africa, I attended sessions from 25 September to 20 October 2017 at the UNISA School of Business Leadership in Midrand, South Africa. The participants were highly skilled and experienced, leading to robust debate, sharing of ideas and participatory learning. We had over 7 course facilitators, and just to name a few: Mr. Leon Roets, Lecturer and programme convener of Postgraduate Programme of Social and Behavioural Studies (HIV/AIDS), UNISA. He engaged us in cross cutting issues from authentic leadership to advocacy presentations. One of my significant lessons was where we proactively engaged in self-examination and social awareness on why we ranked our individual priority social problem and whether culture, gender, religion or politics influenced our decisions. In the end, through group interaction, I learned to empathise and re-negotiate an all-inclusive ranking system, creation of ranks, and a response to needs.

Prof. G. Nhamo, Exxaro Chair in Business and Climate Change, UNISA and member of the African Union high-level panel on development of the AU Green Innovation Framework. He engaged us on the environment and sustainability. He challenged our critical capacity to assess the extent to which our home cultural, economic and political organisations are observing practices that seek to minimise harm to our environment. I came away with the understanding that simple things such as temperature, other people, and food are some of the components of our environment, and that environmental management of the components is critical for sustainability. Last, but not least, Ms. Thembile N. Ndlovu, Programme Manager, Middle East and Africa, Microsoft. She engaged us in technology leadership and skills development for the 4th industrial revolution. To prepare for an accelerated technological progress and innovations whose rapid application and diffusion will cause and are causing abrupt changes in our society. I learned through participant observation, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and secondary data analysis to identify sources of change and forces of construction in identifying social problems.

Overall, the public management and governance programme exposed me to public management models and best practices, while building technical and leadership capacity in the areas of transparency, procurement, public financial management, government tender processes, legislative/executive collaboration, citizen engagement and outreach, human resource management, programme implementation, and policy formulation. As a rural community development practitioner, I was deliberately dovetailing prospects of a future and hope in areas such as gender, social work and community welfare, human growth and development, community health, sociology, project management and logistics, community empowerment, microfinance, crisis management, entrepreneurship and criminology.

The culmination of lessons, observations and experiences of my YALI public management and governance programme are found in my individual assignment submitted in December 2017. Titled The Uhuru Project: Institutions of Ubuntu, Indigenous Leadership, Innovatively Re-establishing Indigenous Leadership in Democratic Organs, I propose a case for reinstitution of the senate and effective operating traditional courts in Malawi. In this researched work, I summarily expand the proposal of this case to two underlying issues that have an understated impact on our sociocultural, sociopolitical and socioeconomic realities: federalism and LGBTQIA rights in the criminal justice system. The three-headed issue of senate and traditional courts, federalism and LGBTQIA rights in the criminal justice system did not just emerge recently. It is critical to our collective future and hope that we become conversant with and reconcile ourselves to our sociocultural, sociopolitical and socioeconomic past.

I was born on 8 December 1989 on the cusp of the 90s when a new generation was birthed in both urban areas and rural villages in a poor agricultural country seeking advancement economically and socially. It was three years six months and six days away from the referendum of 14 June 1993 which effectively ended the one-party system of government that was entrenched on 6 July 1964. So on 17 May 1994, the one-party system of government came to a popular end, and a popular multi-party system of government emerged.

Turning the age of 18 in 2007, coevals and I became eligible to vote, and by age of consent, discretion and reason, to inherit the sociocultural, sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems of our nation