Malawi is a country located in Africa. According to AbbreviationFinder, MW is the two-letter ISO code of Malawi, and MWI is the three-letter country abbreviation for Malawi.

Yearbook 1997

Malawi. According to Countryaah, the national day of Malawi is July 6. The coalition government in Malawi had had difficulty operating since parts of the opposition left government work in 1996. These representatives announced in April that they were re-entering the job. President Bakili Muluzi dissolved the government in July to immediately reform it. The members of the opposition from the opposition who did not leave the government in 1996 were allowed to retain their positions during the conversion.

Malawi’s former dictator Hastings Banda died in November in Johannesburg, South Africa, 99 years old. 100,000 Malawians had gathered in Malawi’s capital Lilongwe to attend the five-hour funeral ceremony. The flag-draped coffin was taken to a new burial ground for presidents. The current President Bakili Muluzi, who deposed the now dead dictator in 1994, stated in his funeral speech that he had not opposed Banda personally but only fought against his one-party system.

History

The political life of Malawi was dominated for thirty years by HK Banda, at the head of the country since independence (1964), president of the Republic for life since 1971 and undisputed leader of the single party Malawi Congress Party (MCP). The control exercised by Banda over the party, the government and the entire country was absolute. In a mixture of authoritarian paternalism and brutal repression, he sought to define, with laws that imposed codes of conduct (e.g. women were forbidden to wear trousers), even the minute aspects of the population’s life, and crushed all forms of dissent with ferocious methods such as imprisonment without trial, torture, the physical elimination of opponents, the confiscation of their assets (methods repeatedly denounced by human rights organizations). The country has also lived in a sort of relative isolation, even with respect to the neighboring states of southern Africa, isolation reinforced by the strongly conservative attitude pursued in foreign policy, which led the Malawi apartheid and with Portugal during the Mozambique liberation war, as well as providing logistical support to the anti-government guerrillas of the RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana) during the civil war in Mozambique itself. Only at the beginning of the nineties a series of internal and international factors favored a progressive and rapid dissolution of the regime.

In the first months of 1992, on the one hand the pressure from creditor countries who threatened to suspend non-humanitarian aid, and on the other the harsh criticism of the Catholic Church, which in March 1992 with an open letter from the bishops denounced the brutality of the methods of government and the lack of respect for human rights, opened a way to an internal opposition that had not been able to find organized forms of political expression. In May, popular demonstrations, which took on the character of real riots, affected several cities and were harshly repressed.

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On the basis of these events, the opposition in exile also reorganized and in September of the same year two political groups were formed within the country, Alliance for Democracy (AFORD) and United Democratic Front (UDF). In October Banda was forced, in a situation that seemed increasingly to escape the control of the security forces, to grant a referendum on the introduction of the multi-party system. The referendum, which took place in June 1993 and recorded the clear affirmation of the multi-party option, was followed by the introduction of constitutional amendments that abolished the presidency for life and allowed the formation of political parties, and by an amnesty provision for thousands of exiled.

In May 1994, after the adoption of a provisional Constitution, the elections for the National Assembly and for the presidency of the Republic took place at the same time. Banda, a candidate for the MCP, was flatly defeated and his party only won 55 of the 177 seats in the new parliament. B. Moluzi, leader of the UDF, was elected president, while the same UDF obtained 84 seats and the AFORD 36(in two colleges the vote was invalidated). In the absence of strong ideological differences between the parties, regional and ethnic roots ended up being the main factor in the distribution of the vote: the AFORD garnered the highest consensus in the north of the country, the MCP in the central region and the UDF in the south. Contrary to expectations, an agreement was not reached between AFORD and UDF, and the latter gave birth to a minority government, which immediately launched a measure for the release of political prisoners and initiated a policy of national reconciliation.

The lack of a stable parliamentary majority forced the ruling party to seek continuous compromises with the AFORD and determined uncertainties of political direction both in the fight against corruption, strongly rooted in the state apparatus, and in the effective democratization of civil life. More effective were the government’s initiatives in the economic field since 1995 – 96, thanks also to the good performance of the tobacco harvest. The interventions of economic liberalization, the promotion of foreign investments and the privatization of state property, conducted according to the indications of the IMF, together with the reduction of social expenses, despite having improved the state budget, did not seem to have laid the foundations for growth. lasting. In reality, despite signs of improvement, the structural conditions of the economy remained characterized by extreme fragility, above all due to the strong dependence of agriculture on climatic trends. Furthermore, the strong spread of the AIDS epidemic which has hit, in particular, the productive sectors of the population, in addition to the dramatic effects on society, it has had heavy economic repercussions, the long-term impact of which is difficult to predict. The presidential and legislative elections, held in June1999, they left the political framework substantially unchanged: Muluzi was confirmed president and the UDF remained, with 93 seats, the first party.