Malawi's failed state trifecta

You read the blog on the enviromental self-destruction and got my argument about Malawi suffering too little globalization.

Then the blog about the impending starvation crisis.

Now the story about Malawi's horrifically bad legal system:

November 6, 2005

The Forgotten of Africa, Wasting Away in Jails Without Trial



By MICHAEL WINES

New York Times

LILONGWE, Malawi - Since Nov. 10, 1999, Lackson Sikayenera has been incarcerated in Maula Prison, a dozen iron-roofed barracks set on yellow dirt and hemmed by barbed wire just outside Malawi's capital city.

He eats one meal of porridge daily. He spends 14 hours each day in a cell with 160 other men, packed on the concrete floor, unable even to move. The water is dirty; the toilets foul. Disease is rife.

But the worst part may be that in the case of Mr. Sikayenera, who is accused of killing his brother, the charges against him have not yet even reached a court. Almost certainly, they never will. For sometime after November 1999, justice officials lost his case file. His guards know where he is. But for all Malawi's courts know, he does not exist.

"Why is it that my file is missing?" he asked, his voice a mix of rage and desperation. "Who took my file? Why do I suffer like this? Should I keep on staying in prison just because my file is not found? For how long should I stay in prison? For how long?"

This is life in Malawi's high-security prisons, Dickens in the tropics, places of cruel, but hardly unusual punishment. Prosecutors, judges, even prison wardens agree that conditions are unbearable, confinements intolerably long, justice scandalously uneven.

But by African standards, Malawi is not the worst place to do time. For many of Africa's one million prison inmates, conditions are equally unspeakable - or more so. . .

This is the classic Gap trifecta: crappy legal system scares away foreign direct investment, so workers turn on the environment by default, and food crises ensue.

Food aid isn't the answer (though we must pursue it), and asking them to protect their environment in the meantime isn't the answer (as much as we might want them to). And frankly, expecting their government to get good absent a private sector that both generates sufficient transation rates to trigger such development and grows a business class that demands it through pressure and influence, is simply hoping against hope.

You put that analysis together and you find yourself strangely attracted to Bono's debt relief and Jeffrey Sachs' "big push" on foreign aid to jumpstart the economy.

Add in some common sense on needing to deal with security situations (like evil Robert Mugabe right next door in Zimbabwe) and I'm there.