By Mabvuto Banda
LILONGWE, April 6 (Reuters) – Malawi’s Bingu wa Mutharika
liked to portray himself as the all-knowing
“economist-in-chief”, presiding over an unprecedented run of
boom years in the destitute southern African state.
Instead, he is more likely to be remembered as an
old-fashioned African autocrat who picked a disastrous fight
with foreign donors and ordered a crackdown on anti-government
protesters in which 20 people were killed – a watershed moment
for the peace-loving “Warm Heart of Africa”.
The mixture of relief and jubilation that greeted the
78-year-old’s death on Thursday is a far cry from when he first
came to power in 2004.
Then, Malawi’s 13 million people hoped Mutharika would use
his experience as a World Bank technocrat and regional trade
expert to stamp out corruption and raise the fortunes of his
landlocked and AIDS-blighted country.
Educated in law and economics at home and in India and the
United States, he had the free-market credentials to get the
largely agricultural economy moving – and for most of his eight
years in power, it worked.
Due mainly to a donor-funded fertiliser subsidy scheme and
some decent rains, Malawi’s maize harvests boomed, pushing
annual economic growth to 10 percent, one of the highest rates
in the world.
But even during the good times, the former British colony
remained dangerously dependent on one product – tobacco, which
accounted for up to 80 percent of foreign exchange earnings.
As a run of poor harvests and even poorer sales hit home,
Malawi’s currency, the kwacha, came under severe pressure
from businesses desperate for dollars to buy the food, fuel and
medicines that could not be produced at home.
Continued…
