MALAWI POLICE WOMEN’S NETWORK

Police women in the Malawi Police Service are grappling to establish a women’s network. This is an association of female police officers that will aim to improve the lot of its members. In their draft constitution they state that their goal is to ‘optimize the position of female police officers in the police system by identifying and raising awareness and understanding of issues affecting women in the Malawi Police Service, developing a network of professional and social contacts locally, regionally and internationally, facilitating the sharing of information on issues affecting women and contributing towards the continuous development of its members.

In July 2013 the network conducted a series of consultative workshops to elicit contributions towards the draft constitution. I was selected to be one of the officers to critique the draft policy document on 4^th July 2013 at Kasungu Inn. I decided this was the opportunity for me to practise and sharpen my policy analysis skills. This was the last of the four consultative meetings that they had conducted. A number of interesting topics were discussed. Among them, we were asked to think out factors that affect the performance of police women in the Malawi Police Service. I raised an issue which is at the core of organisational performance, but which everybody chooses to avoid due to its sensitivity. This is the issue of relationships between officers. Service Standing Order (SSO) 31 governs the conduct of police women in the Malawi Police Service in terms of: discipline, when they may marry, when they may fall pregnant, the uniforms they must wear, and the type of makeup they are allowed to wear. The document fails to provide adequate guidance on officer/officer marriages.

Service Standing Order (SSO) 31provides that 

“Any officer, of whatever rank, who illegally impregnates any police woman or has an unlawful love affair with a police woman or causes her to break the conditions of her probationary period, is to be dealt with for a breach of discipline”. 

From this SSO, it is clear that officer-to-officer marriages are not prohibited (provided they are heterosexual), and as expected, so many of them have sprouted since 1972 when the first cohort of police women was recruited into the Malawi Police Service. The regulation also leaves a host of important questions unanswered. For instance, it does not say what constitutes illegal impregnation of a police woman or what an unlawful love affair with a police woman is. In addition, the policy implicitly assumes that the balance of power would always be in favour of a male police officer, a situation which is being challenged by current trends. In other words, SSO 31 fails to anticipate situations where a senior female police officer would be involved in a love affair with a junior male officer.

What makes this topic sensitive is that many senior male police officers have married junior female officers and this has a bearing on organisational performance. This is most apparent at police stations situated near the national police headquarters in the capital, Lilongwe. These stations are disproportionately populated by female police officers whose husbands hold positions of command at the headquarters. According to our organizational culture, wives of officers enjoy the full compliments of their husbands’ positions in their interactions with each other and with other officers. This makes such stations difficult to govern. Station commanders complain about such women’s absenteeism on unconvincing grounds, laziness, poor conduct and a lot other allegations. Stories are told of retaliatory behavior when commanding officers try to discipline wives of senior officers. Unfortunately, in spite of all these challenges, nobody would want to move a debate on this issue.

When I raised this issue, participants to the workshop, who were all police officers, brought up crazy scenarios which may happen but which have not been carefully thought through and therefore are not reflected in any organizational policies. For example, would it be acceptable if the two top posts in the organizational hierarchy were filled by husband and wife? And what would happen if a female inspector general or a female commissioner married a male constable? Perhaps these scenarios are extreme and improbable in the foreseeable future, but at the local station level we are already slowly seeing situations where two key station portfolios are held by husband and wife. For instance, at one station, the commander and the deputy commander are husband and wife respectively and at another, the commander and the head of CID are spouses.

I think marriages and relationships between officers cannot and should not be stopped. One outstanding advantage of these marriages is that they are efficient in the use of institutional housing which is already in short supply. However, I think a healthy debate must be encouraged now and different scenarios and their possible implications should be brought to light. I think this is especially expedient now that funny permutations are beginning to show at some stations. Policies should be crafted to limit the adverse effects of such marriages.
This workshop has excited my interest in policy analysis. Of late I am being called upon to analyse different policies. For instance, I am currently required to analyse and comment on the Reserve Bank of Malawi's Counterfeit Currency Management Policy as well as Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Guidelines of Policies on Immunities and Privileges for Diplomatic Staff. It is therefore clear that policy analysis skills will be very important to me. I therefore plan to privately study policy analysis systematically. I think with the discipline I have gained as a self-directed distance learner, I will be able to achieve this.

FIRST SEMESTER AS A UNIVERSITY LECTURER

In April 2013 I was given a part-time job as a university lecturer at the Centre for Security Studies of Mzuzu University to teach Human Resource Management (SSHR2405) to second year undergraduates. This is consistent with my long-term employability goal of going into higher education on retirement from the police in the future. Meanwhile, I just finished marking an end-of-semester examination last week and I think this is the right time for me to reflect on the extent to which I have been a good university lecturer. My reflections will inform my performance in the next semester which opens in August. In this post I examine my coverage of the syllabus, the extent to which learners demonstrated an understanding of the subject and the extent to which I satisfied the assessment criteria. In each case problem areas are highlighted and future lessons are drawn.

During the semester I covered eight of the ten topics that I was required to teach over the period of fourteen weeks. This represents an 80% coverage of the syllabus. The failure to complete the syllabus can be attributed to two major reasons: Firstly, it was because of my many other commitments as a police manager and as a University of Leicester student. As a police manager, I coordinate a number of projects which take up a significant proportion of my time, making it difficult for me to travel to Mzuzu for classes sometimes. Secondly, it was because of the long distance between my city of residence and the city where the university is located. Because of the distance it was necessary for me to travel down to Mzuzu every two weeks and spend at least a week. This sometimes brought serious conflicts with my work schedule as I was required to be in my office to sign some things off and to provide direction in other things. The 800 kilometre return journey also presented some logistical challenges in terms of travel expenses and subsistence which the university must meet.

But covering the syllabus alone is not very useful if students do not demonstrate to have understood the material. For this purpose the university required me to administer at least two continuous assessment assignments and an end-of-semester examination. In this respect I am glad to have beaten this minimum performance standard by administering three assignments: an essay, a group presentation and a mid semester examination. Although all the twenty one students passed the subject some of them had serious problems writing an essay. For instance, when marking I discovered that two students had presented the same essay as their own work. I disqualified the essay and demanded that they both resubmit, which they did. In addition, most students were overly descriptive in their essays and little care was given to referencing. Some copied whole chunks of my powerpoint class notes and presented them as their work without proper acknowledgement.

The next semester opens in August 2013 and there is a need for me to make some improvements based on the lessons that I have learned in my first semester as a university lecturer. In order to complete the syllabus I have produced a calendar of my engagements with the Centre for Security Studies which I will present to the University and possibly resources can be made available in advance. In addition, I have given more autonomy to superintendents in my office in order to empower them so that they can more easily cover up for my absences, which have become frequent. In order for me to complete my multiple tasks, time management is of the essence. I will draw up a time table and keep to it and I will learn to work with more speed. I will also provide more guidance to my students regarding essay writing. My learning experience with the University of Leicester will be useful for this purpose. I will warn the learners sternly against plagiarism and all academic malpractices and provide more comprehensive feedback on their work.

On the whole, I think I have had an enjoyable experience as a university lecturer and I look forward to a more exciting time in the next semester. I would want to use my experience with Mzuzu University as a spring board to a career with bigger universities. South Africa and Europe are my dream destinations. In sum, I think my post-policing employability objectives are on course.

Democratic Governance Programme

The Government of Malawi has been implementing a European Union-funded Democratic Governance Programme (DGP) since October 2011. The Malawi Police Service is one of the nine beneficiary institutions of the programme and has since implemented a number of activities under the programme. Two of the activities carried out under DGP are the training of CID officers in investigative interviewing skills and human rights and the training of public order management officers in human rights. The purpose of these two activities was to reduce the frequency and severity of abuses of force by police officers especially as they relates to investigation of crimes and policing of disorder. This comes against a background of a rise in the number of recorded deaths of suspects in police custody and the killing of 20 demonstrators by police officers on July 20^th and 21^st inn 2011.

The Malawi Police Service proposes to carry these two activities over into the year 2013-14 but before they can be implemented a need has been identified to evaluate the impact of the activities on the targeted officers’ observance of human rights. This evaluation will be conducted by my unit, the Research and Planning Unit, with assistance from an external consultant. I think my MSc in Police Leadership and Management will be handy for this purpose. Module four, which I am currently reading, is about ‘Policing and Crime Prevention’ and unit four of this module is about ‘Evaluating Crime Prevention’. Drawing on this unit, the evaluation will seek to examine whether abuses of force by police have diminished over the past two years. The evaluation study will also examine the extent to which changes in officers’ use of force can be attributed to the training that has been conducted as part of the programme. The study will also seek to pin down what it was about the training that led to the changes identified and how the problem was affected through the training. It will further examine whether there were other outcomes that resulted from the intervention.

This evaluation will inform the design and implementation of the trainings in 2013/14. This piece of writing will be instrumental in the preparation of the job advertisement to attract the right candidates for the consultancy. It will inform the terms of reference for the successful candidate.

WORLD POPULATION DAY

Yesterday, 11^th July, 2013 was World Population Day. Commemorating the day, Zodiak Broadcasting Station, a local FM radio station, broadcast a live panel discussion today, 12^th July starting from 19:30 hours local time (17:30 GMT) from one of the leading hotels in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. The discussion that drew panelists from the Ministry of Health, some sexual and reproductive health NGOs, and the UNFPA, the sponsor of the programme, was lively and interesting. The audience comprised mainly local nursing and medical university and college students.

The theme of the discussion was “No Children by Children”. Discussants were asked to illuminate the problems Malawi is facing as a result of rapid population growth, in general, and adolescent child bearing, in particular. They also sought to suggest strategies that would address these challenges. It is important to mention that Malawi is a small poor country (118,000 square kilometers) with a population size of 14 million people and an annual population growth rate 2.8 percent.

I found the absence of a criminological perspective in explicating the consequences of teenage pregnancies and rapid growth intriguing, but not surprising, considering that the panelists and most of the audience came from nursing and medical professional and academic backgrounds. The common thread in their arguments was that teenage child bearing and rapid population growth generates violations of girls’ rights, exacerbates poverty and retards development. If I was present at this debate I would argue that teenage pregnancies reduce girls’ life chances by diminishing both their marriageability and employability. This predisposes girls to prostitution, an illegitimate way of meeting socially valued ends. Once girls choose prostitution as a means of livelihood, the likelihood of entering the criminal justice system and acquiring a criminal record, becomes high, which nearly dooms any chances of future employment and/or marriage. This entrenches such girls and their offspring into a vicious cycle of social deprivation, an acknowledged cause of criminality.

The discussants also failed to see that rapid population growth would result in increase in conflicts as resources became scarce despite all the evidence in the media. People have already started fighting over land, water and fishery resources in many parts of the country. Xenophobic violence against foreign business persons over economic opportunities has also been reported in the mass media. For instance, recently, Malawians working for a Brazilian rail construction company, Vale, attacked Thai nationals for taking up semi-skilled work which, they argued, should be done by Malawians.

It was surprising that although most discussants came from the health sector, none of them suggested the three-tier model of primary, secondary and tertiary prevention, which they have used for many years to control diseases. This, in my view, offers a clever organizing tool for a robust response to the problem of teen pregnancies. For instance, under primary prevention of early pregnancies we could include untargeted girl empowerment strategies such as compulsory girl education or a raised marriage age. Under secondary prevention would come interventions that target areas where the risk of teenage marriage and teenage sex is high. It is easy to isolate such areas by using mapping techniques and by analyzing cultural practices that fuel early pregnancies. In fact, in the case of Malawi such places are well known. Tertiary prevention would be exacted at young girls who become pregnant, men who make them pregnant or parents who force immature girls into marriage. These strategies would include sending girls back to school after child birth or stiff, swift and certain penalties for men who make girls pregnant. Indeed, this is the time to slow the population growth.

POLICE STATION COMMANDERS’ FORUM

Use of social media among Malawian senior police officers is limited. Most officers do not use face book or LinkedIn or blog. In this project I will set up a network in Google Plus where station commanders and other senior officers will share information on different subjects related to police work. For instance, officers will share success stories, best practices, emerging trends in crime, misconduct by junior officers or events taking place in their respective jurisdictions. They will also share frustrations and keep each other informed of developments taking place in the larger organization. Top management will also be able to use the network to disseminate operational and administrative information to station commanders. This will supplement the existing traditional methods of communication.

I have chosen Google Plus for a number of reasons. Firstly, like Face Book, LinkedIn or Blog, Google Plus provides controlled access to the forum. In this regard, a circle of connections will be made comprising senior police officers only. This is important for a closed organization such as the police. Secondly, unlike blog where only the blog’s administrator can introduce a new issue, and the rest can only comment on it, in this Google Plus forum each officer will be free to introduce a new topic. This flexibility is important because it increases the officers’ sense of ownership and control of the network. Thirdly, Google Plus can support a video conference of up to ten people at a time. I think this capability can be used innovatively by provincial commissioners to conduct a meeting with station commanders under their command. Similarly, the Inspector General can use the facility to hold meetings with provincial commissioners. This virtual meeting will save time and resources which would have been used to organize a real world meeting.

Despite the usefulness of the network spelt above, I anticipate a few challenges in implementing this project. I foresee a problem related to the culture of silence and secrecy associated with police officers. This problem is exacerbated because the targeted officers are older and conservative. Concerns over privacy are of critical importance among them. A related problem is that technological literacy is very low among this cadre of officers. This challenge becomes worse because most senior officers do not have personal computers.

In order to overcome officer fears over the security of the information that will be shared on the network there will be a need for an awareness campaign. For instance, officers will have to be made aware of the capability of Google Plus to organize connections in circles so that only those connections that are in this circle will have access to the information on the network. Officers who will be allowed access to the network will have to be vetted so that unwanted elements are excluded. The benefits of communicating on the network will also need to be emphasized over the need for secrecy. Officers will also have to be educated on the use of the facility via smart phones, which they have, fortunately. I hope that this project will increase the effectiveness and efficiency of officers in the long run.
Apart from the benefits that the Malawi Police Service will reap from this project, I as an individual, will have improved greatly my networking and technological skills, which enhances both my chances of a promotion within the Malawi Police Service as well as my future employability profile.