President Joyce Banda of Malawi is an exemplary African leadcame a member of parliament, Minister of Foreign Affairs aner. From her pedigree as a successful business woman and rights actvist, she bed Vice President. She is billed to deliver the annual Osigwe Anyiam-Osigwe Lecture in Lagos tomorrow, writes DADA ALADELOKUN.
The Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, Victoria Island, Lagos, will come alive tomorrow. President Joyce Hilda Banda of the Republic of Malawi will be the cynosure of all eyes as she mounts the rostrum as guest speaker at the 14th session of the annual Osigwe Anyiam-Osigwe Foundation Lecture.
She will evince her prowess as one of the Forbes’ 100 most powerful people in the world, her pedigree as a grassroots mobiliser and her advocacy skill in defence of the poor and the vulnerable in the society.
The lecture’s central theme is: Genuine democracy: The price and the prize, but Banda will specifically address the topic: Leadership and the challenge of delivering appropriate dividends of democracy to the citizens.
As a president of an endowed yet very poor African country, Banda assumed the position at a very difficult and challenging moment in Malawi. The economy was in shambles and protests which often became violent were regular occurrences due to sanctions and needless face-off between the government of her predecessor, former President Bingu wa Mutharika and the main Western allies and donors.
Mutharika had earlier sidelined her as Vice President of the country and banned her from attending cabinet meetings due to the politics of succession and third term ambition of the former strongman and Banda’s popularity as grassroots politician. The former president sensing that she is becoming increasingly too popular to put a spanner into his self-succession plan beyond the constitutionally allowed two terms sacked her as the Vice President of their party. Banda steadfastly resisted Mutharika’s efforts to force her out office while the succession battle got to its peak when the late president decided to groom his brother Peter Mutharika to become his Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) candidate in the country’s coming 2014 general elections. She left DPP to form her own People’s Party with her supporters and she emerged as one of Mutharika’s fiercest critics while still the country’s Vice President, lambasting her boss management of an economy hobbled by fuel shortages.
When Mutharika knew third term was not feasible with the then Vice President Banda consolidating her newly registered party People’s Party, he wanted his younger brother Peter to take over from him, thereby perpetuating a family dynasty. While the plots to remove her as Vice President was going on, President Mutharika took ill and eventually died in a South African hospital. Two days after he died on April 5, his kitchen cabinet led by his younger brother refused to inform the country about the death of the president and this created a constitutional crisis for two days as Malawi was without a leader.
With regional and global pressure from the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Africa Union and the United Nations backed by the civil society groups in Malawi she was allowed to assume leadership of the impoverished country whose economic mainstay is agriculture.
Having worked all her life empowering women, promoting girl-child education and combating poverty in the rural areas through her various macro-credit interventions, she assumed the presidency of Malawi with her heart in the right places. First she embarked on major diplomatic shuttle first within Africa and around the world to repair broken relationships with major world powers and the multi-lateral institutions which include the World Bank, ADB and the IMF. Her diplomatic shuttles yielded immediate results as all the frozen donor monies started coming in. For most of the presidency of Mutharika the country could not fund its annual budget due to blockade on donors’ funds which is about 40% of the country’s annual budget. Mutharika’s human right records were horrible, he muzzled the press and emasculated the judiciary as he became paranoid and ready to crush any opposition to his self-succession plan.
To prove to the world that she means business and ready to get her hands dirty in her bid to get Malawi out of the morass of poverty and under-development, she sold off the Presidential jet and 60 Mercedes Benz Limousines Mutharika government bought for executive use and cut her own salary and other benefits by 30 per cent and that of her ministers. When asked why she sold off the Presidential Jet her predecessor bought for $22million US dollars with annual maintenance cost of more than $300,000 US dollars she said, ‘’I must lead by example. My country is a country where 80% of Malawians are living in extremely poor rural areas. The times are hard for the country and we cannot afford a luxury of an executive jet and limousines. If I told my people to brace up for the challenges ahead and tighten their belts my own belt must be tighter. I cannot be flying presidential jet with the prohibitive cost of maintaining it and be telling my people they should endure hardship. I must prove to Malawians that we are in it together. A country that is struggling to get drugs into its hospitals cannot afford the luxury of a jet for her president’’ she explained.
Within her few days in office she tackled headlong the problem of acute fuel shortage which has become a blight on the country’s economy as people cue for weeks in search of fuel. She reached out to oil producing countries and Nigeria to get oil to power the economy. She started a number of reform programmes to give new life to the already comatose economy and with about two years as President of Malawi the country is on the right path to recovery with the local currency Kwacha stabilising against the US Dollars after the devaluation and the inflation has reduced from over 40 per cent to 28 per cent a figure she is determined to bring further down until it gets to a single digit.
In her recent address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York she told the world leaders in attendance that the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals agenda should focus on given income to households if the world is serious about real development and sustainable peace. She said ‘’If we cannot uplift the people that are in our rural areas, as is the case for many developing countries to earn decent income in the household, the vicious circle of population growth, malnutrition, maternal risks, poverty will remain with us. If the post 2015 development agenda is to realise its dream, we need to go to the grassroots where the poor are. This will drive us to equality of opportunity for people across all income groups and help us realize our dream of shared prosperity. This is key to restoring the dignity of all our people.’’
To demonstrate her commitment to the quest of helping households to get decent income she has integrated the people into her economic development agenda through rural cooperatives that enable the rural poor to benefit in some of her infrastructural and housing projects.
In a continent where many leaders dither and condone corruption among their friends and inner circle she recently sacked her entire cabinet and close aides for corruption charges and got the country’s anti-corruption agency to prosecute those accused of corrupt practices.
On her choice as the keynote speaker of the Anyiam-Osigwe lecture series, Coordinator-General of the Foundation, Mr. Michael Anyiam-Osigwe said the trustees of the foundation decided on her due to her rare and shining example among African leaders.
‘’She inherited a country in total mess and within a short period she is turning around the fortune of the country. She is restoring hope to Malawians who have been despondent. Her people can see steady and remarkable progress. She knows what she wants for her people and what her priorities are. Even when the country seems not to have the means in terms of money like other countries within the continent she is focused and determined to turn around the fortunes of her country. She is expanding the revenue base of the country. She has a strong will to make Malawi the biggest example of what a great leader can do to turn-around a country. Mrs. Banda has the mental and intellectual depth to do justice to our theme and her topic at our public lecture this year and I am sure Nigerians will applaud her. She will share her experiences and insights with our policy makers and some of our leaders who will attend the lecture.’’
Her profile on Wikipedia reveals she was born Joyce Hilda Ntila on April 12, 1950 in Malemia, a village in the Zomba District of Nyasaland (now Malawi). Her father was an accomplished and popular police brass band musician. She has a Cambridge School Certificate, followed with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Early Childhood Education from Columbus University in United States and another degree, Bachelor of Social Studies in Gender Studies from the Atlantic International University, United States. She also obtained a Diploma in Management of NGOs from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Centre in Turin, Italy. She is currently pursuing a Master of Arts Degree in Leadership at Royal Roads University in Canada. She received an honorary doctorate this year from Jeonju University in South Korea.
President Banda has been involved with many grassroots projects with women since the age of 25 to bring about policy change, particularly in education. She founded the Joyce Banda Foundation for women empowerment and promotion of education. She founded the Young Women Leaders Network, National Association of Business Women and the Hunger Project in Malawi. She (jointly with President Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique) was awarded the 1997 Africa Prize for Leadership for the Sustainable End of Hunger by the Hunger Project, a New York-based non-governmental organisation. She used the prize money to fund the building of the Joyce Banda foundation for children. In 2006, she received the International Award for the Health and Dignity of Women for her dedication to the rights of the women of Malawi by the Americans for United Nations Population Fund.
She served as commissioner for “Bridging a World Divided” alongside personalities such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, and United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, Mary Robinson. Banda was also member of the Advisory Board for Education in Washington DC, and on the advisory board for the Federation of World Peace and Love in Taiwan.
In 2010, Banda became a member of the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health, a group of 16 sitting and former heads of state, high-level policymakers and other leaders committed to advancing reproductive health for lasting development and prosperity.
Chaired by former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, these leaders seek to mobilise the political will and financial resources necessary to achieve universal access to reproductive health by 2015 – a key target of the UN Millennium Development Goals.
