N k h a n i Z a u l e r e
the Malawi Chatterbox August 2005
Hunger again?
Stephen Carr of Zomba Mountain was formerly adviser to the World Bank on
agriculture in Africa, and has 50 years’ hands-on experience as a farmer in
Sudan, Uganda and Malawi. He recently recorded for The Lamp an imaginary
conversation. Here is a compressed version:
Another food shortage?
Afraid so. The Ministry says 250,000 tons. It could be more if sweet potatoes
are affected too.
Cock-up or climate?
Both. The rains cut-off early, especially in the densely populated south. The
early planters had a reasonable crop, but there was confusion about fertilizer
distribution and pricing and the private sector halted imports at the crucial
time. Most farmers received seed and fertilizer too late.
Why are these crises so frequent?
The population has increased tenfold over the last century. Imagine someone
standing a few centimeters from the edge of a cliff. It wouldn’t take a very
strong wind to blow him over the edge.
What are the plans of government?
They say 60,000 tons are now available and they are looking for 90,000 tons of
humanitarian assistance. The last 100,000 will be imported commercially.
Will families be able to afford it?
It’s still a problem. If government subsidizes maize by 50%, the potential for
making a profit could lead to shady deals. There are tough decisions still to
be taken.
What about humanitarian aid?
There are many challenges. There is opposition in the villages if some get
free food while others pay. But if it’s divided up among everybody, the needs
of the really destitute are not met.
Why isn’t the Lake used for irrigation?
Thousands of acres are irrigated by buckets, cups, watering-cans and
treadle-pumps. These are efficient and produce masses of vegetables, but not
much staple food. Bigger gravity-fed schemes have proved expensive and
inefficient. They produce less than 0.5% of the nation’s grain. There has been
a wealth of studies of irrigation by pumping water uphill, but fuel is
expensive and there is no reserve of electricity. The cost per hectare of a
recent donor-funded scheme would have provided 100kg of fertilizer and 25kg of
good seed to a rain-fed farmer every year for a thousand years – and would
have produced vastly more food.
How about large commercial farms?
Two problems. 1. Because of the high cost of imports and spares, big growers
would want a guaranteed price of around K35 per kg. No commercial millers
would be willing to promise this. In Zimbabwe there were large subsidies which
Malawi would find hard to offer. Maize farmers in the US and Europe are
heavily subsidized.
2. Mechanized farms need much foreign exchange for machinery and fuel. Malawi
is short of foreign exchange.
What does government have in mind?
Providing fertilizer and better seed. It is common to see adjacent plots where
one gives three or four times the yield of its neighbour. The difference is
seed and fertilizer. How can China feed its people adequately and Malawi
cannot? The simple answer is that China applies around 690kg of fertilizer on
a hectare; Malawian smallholders average 42kg. If Malawi used 170kg - just a
quarter of China’s figure - there would be a complete transformation of the
food situation.
So why don’t they use much more?
They can’t afford to buy it.
What does government plan to do?
They hope to make 70,000 tons of fertilizer available with a subsidy of £6.40
per bag. The subsidy will cover only half of a small-scale farmer’s needs; the
rest will have to be bought at the full price.
And those who cannot afford fertilizer?
That’s the biggest challenge. There are low-cost ways of improving fertility –
compost, nitrogen-fixing trees, preventing run-off. These have to be promoted
more vigorously, but they involve a lot more labour and are not popular. And
even with these methods, maize still needs the extra nutrients that fertilizer
supplies.
How can people earn money for fertilizer? Unfortunately politicians are
focussing all their attention on the subsidy issue with little thought for the
50% of rural people who will not be helped by the subsidy.
Chiwowa Chisala
Chiwowa Chisala is a well used demonstration garden between Mzuzu and
Nkhata Bay. Here the week long courses provided by the Diocese of Northern
Malawi have been attended by people from every parish in the diocese.
Equal numbers of women and men are learning practical ways of contour ridging,
composting, crop rotation and the food value of different crops. The Chief of
a village wanted to know why his large garden was producing less than the
smaller garden of a returned Chiwowa Chisala trainee!! A very encouraging
enterprise
Bishop Peter Nyanja
The Bishop of Lake Malawi, who died on March 8, was one of the few bishops
in the world to attend three Lambeth Conferences and to be bishop of the same
diocese for almost 27 years. He was 22 when we first met in 1962 and had
recently left the teacher training college where he became a Christian. He
felt called to priesthood, but he had inherited orphans from his brother and
must see them through school – after that, perhaps.
Six years later we were able to send him with two others to train in Tanzania.
He was ordained in 1971 and did a further course at St. John’s Seminary in
Lusaka. In 1977 Bishop. Josiah Mtekateka made him archdeacon of Nkhotakota
with responsibility for 100 miles of densely populated lakeshore. In 1978 he
was consecrated in All Saints Cathedral Nkhotakota as bishop of Lake Malawi in
succession to Josiah.
In the same year Hugh Montefiore became bishop of Malawi’s companion diocese
of Birmingham. They met at the 1978 Lambeth Conference and found that they had
both become Christians at school, Hugh as a Jew, Peter from a family of Nyau-dancers
in the Ntchisi hills. Hugh, who took a lifelong interest in Malawi, came to
Peter’s requiem at St.Martin’s Acton and himself died three months later.
After his consecration Peter said: “Today is the last but one greatest day in
my life. The very last will be the day when I present myself personally before
the good Lord. Every Christian is called to be an ambassador of Christ. It
cost him his life to make us his ambassadors. He has left us a ministry of
reconciliation. There was a family which had no son. At long last a son was
born and they called him ‘Mutisunge’ (‘Look after us’). Some of you may think
today has brought you a Mutisunge. I have news for you. That pregnant woman
has given birth to twins. You can call one of the two Mutisunge if you like
but I claim the right to name the other son ‘Tisungane’ (‘Let’s look after one
another’). Our work is to care for one another. It is the work of
reconciliation with each other and with God.”
The 1978 Lambeth Conference followed shortly afterwards. It left him with the
conviction that we must be a listening church. “There is a lot of talking in
the church today but God is not given much opportunity to speak to us. God is
usually heard properly in quietness. On Mount Horeb he was not in the
earthquake, nor in the fire, but in a soft whisper. God will not be heard in a
worldly noisy church.”
Peter never tired of working to make his diocese a self-supporting church.
Following a visit to Ntchisi in his diocese, he wrote: “In the offering an old
lady offered some beans and a man a big pumpkin. These were sold on the spot
and raised almost the same as what was given in coins. If this kind of giving
is encouraged, we shall have something to teach other people; we shall be
doing what the fast-growing church in Kenya does.”
I asked a layman in Lake Malawi diocese what he saw as Peter’s lasting
contributions. He named without hesitation -
• the College of Christian Ministry
• his interchurch work as chair at various times of CHAM (Christian Health
Association of Malawi), PAC (Public Affairs Committee) and CSC (Christian
Service Comittee)
• supporting the Mothers Union’s literacy courses for women
• in three years of hunger, raising funds from places as far away as the two
Birminghams (UK and Alabama)
• encouraging the new St. Andrew’s Health Centre at Mtunthama in Kasungu
• taking part in three Lambeth Conferences and remaining a man of the people.
“AIDS, Malaria ....All Solvable
Jeffrey Sachs, Special Adviser to Kofi Annan, is “probably the most
important economist in the world” (New York Times). His first visit to Malawi
opened the eyes of the blind and led to his brilliantly written book “The End
of Poverty” (Penguin £7.99). The following is from a recent interview with The
Economist.
Professor Sachs takes me on a verbal tour of Nthandire, about an hour along a
mud road from Lilongwe. “There were no young men anywhere, so I asked if they
were out in the fields. But no, they are all dead from AIDS. Every single one
of those people could have risen from their deathbeds and cared for their
children and worked if they had a drug that costs 60p a day. Because that
doesn’t happen, I met grandmothers who were caring for 15 orphaned children”.
But isn’t all this – as right-wingers like to shrug – the result of corrupt,
incompetent government? “Malawi actually put together one of the earliest and
best-conceived strategies for bringing treatment to its dying population. It
was incredibly thoughtful. They had structures for drug delivery, patient
counselling, community outreach, everything. They appealed to the
international community for the means to treat with anti-AIDS drugs 300,000
people - a third of the total infected population.
“And you know what the international community said? ‘The plans are too
ambitious. Cut them.’ So the government in Malawi cut their plans to saving
100,000 people. Still it was too much. The international community told them
to cut another 60 per cent from the plans. In the end, only 25,000 people were
saved. That’s not a failure of African government. That’s a failure to give
enough aid to a good African government.
“The village was also leveled by another disease that we could deal with
easily: malaria. As many as three million people die in Africa every year of
malaria, most of them children. Even though it is a preventable disease if you
use bed-nets and other controls. There is no clinic nearby to help with this.
That’s what my friend Bono calls insane, stupid poverty, deaths for the price
of pennies. And it’s true.
“All these problems hitting Nthandire and thousands like it are solvable,” he
says. “Climatic disaster, impoverishment, Aids, malaria – all solvable.”
Stewart & Lesley Lane
Stewart recently ended more than 40 years’ service in Malawi, a term
exceeded by only a handful of the early UMCA missionaries such as Archdeacons
Johnson, Glossop, Cox and Winspear. Stewart and Lesley came from the USA to
teach at Malosa in 1964 and between them wrote and produced plays, one of
which won a trophy at the National Drama Festival. They then moved on to the
Polytechnic and Limbe Convent and for 20 years also co-ordinated the Cornelius
Fellowship, which had been founded by David Lee to open people to the Holy
Spirit. In 1978 Stewart was ordained as a voluntary priest and was linked to
Holy Innocents Limbe in various capacities for the next 26 years.
Lesley sadly died of malaria in Blantyre, but Stewart carried on as chaplain
to the Polytechnic and Chancellor College. He writes: “I was on one campus or
the other for several riots and at the Poly for the incursion of the Police
Mobile Force when 80+ students were imprisoned briefly – my only experience of
being around when bullets were flying. Around this time I started writing an
environmental column, ‘Nantchengwa (Hammerkop) Says, which was voted the most
popular column for 2 or 3 years running. I also wrote briefly an agony aunt
column, Gogo Nangozo, but this was scuppered for being too explicit. As
Chaplain at the University I began a series of weekend courses on sex and
marriage. When the ban on independent newspapers was lifted there was a great
paucity of writers and at one point I had 7 or 8 weekly columns going.” Ten
collections from these columns have since appeared as books.
Stewart thinks he may have been the first mzungu to attend Zomba Theological
College as a student. He used to conduct week-end retreats for those about to
be ordained into the Anglican ministry. He collected in his garden at Limbe
many aloes that are native to the country and published The Aloes of Malawi –
A Field Guide. In recent years he has been ringing and surveying the birds on
Mulanje Mountain for the Conservation Trust.
Since January Stewart has been living east of Pretoria and close to his
daughters Emily and Martha and has been accepted as a postulant in the Third
Order of Franciscans. He has a bird-ringing license and has already recorded
over 70 species in his garden. His contacts are: Box 354, Derdepark 0035,
South Africa; stewartlane@yahoo.com
News in brief
Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) are now being distributed nationwide
by Population Services International. Green rectangular nets, preferred by
rural people, are sold for 28p through antenatal clinics. Blue conical nets,
preferred by urban people who sleep on beds, are being sold at full cost
price. It is estimated that by last December 55% of under-5s in Malawi were
being protected by a net and that 70% of all nets had been treated with
insecticide during the previous six months.
Bishop John Sentamu, shortly before his appointment as Archbishop of
York was announced, presided at the Malawi Wheels Service in Birmingham
cathedral. Ndirande Anglican Voices had been flown in from Blantyre and were
ranged behind the altar in their lovely grey-blue robes. Beside the altar were
bikers in black leather from Christian Motorcyclists. Malawi Wheels are in
fact motor-bikes, which Birmingham Diocese is presenting to all the clergy in
Malawi who need and can ride one. At the climax of the service a motor-bike
was ridden up the side-aisle and parked in front of the altar among the
Ndirande Voices. York Minster, be warned!
Kenneth Kaunda, former president of Zambia has come to Lilongwe to help
President Bingu wa Mutharika and his predecessor Bakili Muluzi to work
together. A motion to impeach the president led to chaos in parliament and the
collapse and death of the much-admired Speaker. The Public Affairs Committee,
representing Christianity and Islam, has played a leading role in the
mediation process and this has wide public support.
A political analyst, Boniface Dulani, says that the untimely death of
the Speaker lowered the temperature in parliament. Government was now
listening to the views of the parties and Muluzi’s UDF was talking about
supporting the government. Goodall Gondwe, Minister of Finance, said that both
government and opposition would have to make compromises.
Likoma Cathedral celebrated its centenary in style on June 29. MV Mtendere
brought 800 visitors from Nkhata Bay; others came by planes, canoes and small
boats from the 12 dioceses in four countries to which Likoma has given birth.
President Bingu flew in by helicopter, read the epistle and made his communion
at a four-hour Eucharist, at which he also spoke and promised help with
renewing the floor. This was followed by a public meeting in the arena.
Thousands of purple chitenjes and shirts carried the image of the cathedral
towers and the cloisters.
Dr. Peterkins Kalungwe is the new Medical Officer at St. Anne’s and we
welcome him as diocesan MO, following Dr Tim Wiggin who has returned to the
UK. One of his first tasks will be to equip the new male surgical block for
which Lancing College has raised £16,000. If you would like to walk or sponsor
a walker on the South Downs on September 17th, e-mail Mjhsgibbs@aol.com
Lancing says their 2006 expedition to Malawi is doubly oversubscribed.
The College of Christian Ministry in Lilongwe is built on a large plot
of land in Area 47 of Capital City, stretching from the Mchinji roundabout to
the bishop’s house. It was opened in 2003. It has almost completed a fine set
of buildings – a round church, lecture rooms, library, common rooms, bedrooms,
staff housing etc. – At present it is training 27 men and women, mainly for
lay ministry. One is from Burundi and two from other churches.
Lake Malawi’s new bishop will be chosen by an elective assembly of the
Province on July 30.
Every parish in Lake Malawi Diocese has been asked to make its own nomination.
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