The Maravi Post

At 49 Thoko Banda, the dude who wants to lead the 15 million of us after the 2014 elections, is no “spring chicken”.

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Thanks to the current tobacco market, some life has been breathed back into the sagging Malawi kwacha. Thanks to the leaf – plus some dollar inflows from Western capitals – we have seen some stabilisation of the battered local currency.

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“Let thy speech be better than silence,

or be silent”

-- Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Vice-President Khumbo Kachali, for sometime, was the undisputed champion of a guy who had the proverbial shoe permanently stuck in his mouth. There was a time he competed with himself to say the most bizarre things one wondered whether he was on a political suicide mission or he was high on something not exactly legal.

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Two things of seismic interest happened during the past week – the President’s expected-but-still-unprecedented rejection to sign the so-called Table Mountain Declaration and the drama surrounding the controversially frank remarks of a young chief at a funeral.

Let us start with the latter.

So instead of us talking about the life and times of Justice Joseph Manyungwa we are busy talking about Chief Bvumbwe? Instead of talking about the youthful judge’s controversial journey on the bench, we are talking about a controversial young chief whose only claim to fame was to say the universally-accepted right things at a supposedly wrong place?

Hey, if truth be told, it is not like Justice Manyungwa’s life as a judge and a person had no talking points. The judge had a colourful life of his own; he certainly did not need a young chief to do his bidding.

Hey, was the judge one day not accused of delivering a crucial judgement at his private residence in the middle of the night? And, indeed, was he not accused of delivering a judgment in a case he did not preside over in the first place?

All these are talking points that needed no plodding from a young chief.

But, no, some gullible political types thought otherwise.

Now here we are talking about a young chief who only said things the lot of us have always wanted to say before but had no right platform to say them from.

Cases of politicians using funerals to promote their cause have always been an issue of concern throughout the country. The only difference is that not all funerals have sitting presidents and the media in attendance.

So, ordinarily, Inkosi Bvumbwe should not claim the prize of being the first chief to condemn the malpractice. He just happened to be the first chief whose public condemnation got the loudest cheer from the majority and the most red-hot anger from the highest office in the land.

So, granted, the ruling PP was not the first political party to use a funeral to promote itself. Ruling parties before it have abused such solemn occasions to buy a vote or two.

But they say you are not a thief until you are caught. Since Bvumbwe called the PP its bluff it cannot get away by whining that ‘but the MCP, UDF, DPP have done this before’. It is the PP that was caught with a hand in the cookie jar, as it were.

If the PP has strategists they should have known that they were going to an area where it may not as popular. Bingu wa Mutharika, the godfather of the DPP, is buried just but a few kilometres from Bvumbwe. His mausoleum is a shrine that inspires the blue party apparatchik.

Manyungwa was a judge of the High Court, the second arm of government, yes. President Joyce Banda had all the reasons to attend his funeral. But ruling party strategists should have been cognisant of the fact that they were going into a politically hostile area.

The DPP, wherever it is, is like a wounded buffalo. It was supposed to be in power if not for an accident of fate during those three mad days of April. It knows it has to play second fiddle to the PP which rose to greatness from its misfortune.

So the former ruling party must always be spoiling for a fight whenever it sees any sign of the PP.

Surely therefore PP strategists should always anticipate that their DPP cousins are on the look-out for any mis-step to pounce. It should always be on its guard.

Chief Bvumbwe can be labelled anything – a drunk, a DPP operative, even a guy who fraudulently ascended to the throne.

But whatever he said in condemnation of the PP action was correct. Surely, no party – be they the ruling or the opposition – should be allowed to use solemn ceremonies like funerals to further their cause. Whether the chief’s breath reeks of alcohol 24-hours a day or his blood is as blue as the sky or he should have been tendering the chief’s herd of cattle instead of being on the throne are subjects for other discussions.

The President, who was seen nodding in agreement to what the young chief was saying, could have turned this on its head to her advantage if her strategists had not dropped the ball. She should have risen to the occasion and agreed with the chief to condemn such unbecoming behaviour of distributing partisan party paraphernalia at such a solemn occasion.

All of us could have gone home with the feeling that it was just overzealous party stalwarts that hatched up that crazy idea. The President could have left the ceremony with her head up.

But for her apologists to come in the open to say Abiti was mad at the young ngwenyama was the most ill-advised idea the ruling party could have thought of. For government to go all the way to assemble some gullible chiefs to cartoon themselves before the media to condemn the young chief is beyond comprehension.

The haphazardly crafted script the chiefs read from was a typical 101 in how not to do politics. The chiefs seemed not to be sure whether to agree with their colleague or send him to the cleaners. How could they say the chief was right to condemn the PP malpractice while at the same time saying he was wrong to make his views known there and then?

Where I come from - which is Malawi, by the way - funeral occasions are the right place where bottled up issues are spewed out. If your behaviour is embarrassing your kith and kin you are rebuked about the same during the kusesa ceremony.

People tell it as it is during such ceremonies. So what Bvumbwe said was not out of the ordinary. The government – read PP – should have taken it on the chin.

But by reacting the way it did, PP has exposed its soft underbelly. Now its archrival, the DPP, will exploit this as much as possible. All the hullabaloo by the chief’s so-called subjects over his apparently staged disappearance is just the DPP in its element. A true Ngoni chief cannot – indeed should not - go underground just for speaking his mind.

The ngwenyama is evidently just playing a political ‘hide-and-seek’ game for I do not think he really believes in this day and age the PP can physically harm him.

But you cannot blame the chief or the DPP. The PP played right in their hands by playing politics with a simple issue. After all the ruling party’s own attack dog Uladi ‘Chenji Golo’ Mussa is on record as saying in politics anything goes, you exploit your opponent’s weakness as much as possible.

For the Muckraker take on the president's refusal to endorse the Table Mountain Declaration, click here

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