What led to 20 July and the Red Army in Malawi

I want to talk about some other ideas about what’s been happening in Malawi, but in order to do that, I have to give a primer of sorts about how Malawi got to the point where nationwide protests and rioting happened. This will be my understanding, with lots of links, so you can see how I came to my understanding, and you can disagree with me if you like.

What happened today has been coming for months. You can read this great and informative general timeline, which I will rehash a bit of and add a bit to, but here’s the upshot: dissent has been getting harder and harder to safely engage in, and the economic situation has been getting worse. The fact that there was going to be news today (from the yay! things on fire=page views perspective) was blatantly obvious to anyone who had the time and interest to connect the dots. The anti-farting legislation seemed like a huge joke in January and February of this year, but if you reframe it in the context of giving the government the ability to arrest any dissenter for specious reasons, suddenly it doesn’t seem that funny.  Laws like Section 46 of the Penal Code, which allows the Minister of Information to ban importation and publication of anything determined not to be in the public interest, then become logical extensions of the restrictions on freedom of speech.

Put that law in context of a country where in March a lecturer from Chancellor College, Blessings Chinsinga, was detained for questioning and then fired just for talking about the Arab Spring in his Political Science class (I’m pretty sure discussing things like the Arab Spring is the purpose of Political Science classes). This resulted in protests at Chanco where the police threw teargas and beat protestors. In the meantime, Bingu has been shutting down dissent and consolidating the power of the executive branch. Even his vice president, Joyce Banda, left the DPP and is trying to start her own party, only to have her security detail decreased. For the protests, she was threatened with arrest.

The economic situation in Malawi has become increasingly dire. Because the UK High Commissioner cable that stated the perfectly justified concerns about governance was leaked to Bingu, the UK High Commissioner was expelled from the country, which eventually, through continued posturing and stubbornness, led the UK to suspend aid to Malawi. 40% of Malawi’s budget comes from foreign aid.

Bingu has refused to revalue the kwacha at the internationally agreed on amount, thus depleting the foreign exchange (forex) which is what allows Malawi to buy things from abroad, such as medications and fuel. He further depleted the forex through his purchase of a private jet last year and the continued maintenance of the plane. Because of this, there are continuous fuel, medicine, and water shortages, affecting both travel and the functioning of things like grain mills and clinics. Everyone is affected in some form or another.

So, that’s the background, and it’s been heating up as Bingu seems to be more and more intractable. When the DPP started sending out thugs in their DPP vehicles with panga knives and when pro-DPP people started threatening the protestors, it seemed obvious that shit was going to go down. It seemed like everyone should have seen it coming.