Leading to the 1999 Parliamentary and Presidential elections I granted myself the liberty of advising a major opposition party to, instead of just ranting about how corrupt the people in government were, show its commitment to weed out and root out corruption when and if it gets in government by in-scripting into its manifesto ‘the zero tolerance to corruption’ line and openly campaign on it if it was serious about fighting corruption because after all it was a vote garner and an incontrovertible testimony of its commitment to disciplined fiscal and democratic governance. But, maybe not too surprisingly, my advice was adjudged extremely unpalatable and not taken on board! Clearly our parties will do anything to get in government but rarely go in government to tamper with anything that does not enrich them.Let me make the case for treating corruption—this ‘self-serving’ malfeasance culminating in the shameless thievery of public moneys on the scale of the ‘alleged’ 167,000 plus metric-tons maize-sale scam (worth K42B at present prices!) involving the dubious maize-sale at NFRA to top ruling party politicians and government officials in 1999, the ‘alleged’ Muluzi’s K8B plus thievery (every gift a sitting president receives from wherever and whomever is a gift for the people he/she serves, he/she starts getting personal gifts after leaving office), the ‘alleged’ Bingu’s K61B plus thievery , the ‘alleged’ Joyce Banda’s K24B plus ‘capital hill’ thievery (christened ‘cashgate’) and, yes, the ‘alleged’ Peter’s K577B plus thievery (we have not been privileged to see the report purporting to reduce this value to K236B!, Peter is the one shielding the implicated individuals! and for all we know his name could well be on the list of implicated individuals!)—as Public Enemy No.1 and ‘nailing’ him/her down for punishment using the harshest forfeiture clauses on the books and handing down a stiff sentence—life or death by firing squad (employing the most direct and apt legal routes for obtaining a conviction).
Public resources are wrung out from our fiscally over-burdened citizenry (through taxes, rates, duties, levies or other impositions) for the purpose of meeting expenditures charged under our Republican Constitution necessary to carry on the core services of the Government on which citizens rely consistent with and given the full expression by sections 173(1) and 174 of our Republican Constitution, resources that must not be lost (through abuse or out-and-out thievery) or wasted (through imprudence or pretences to magnanimity which recipients themselves, more than anyone else, recognize sap initiative, create some of the very problems they may be purporting to resolve and ultimately undermine self-respect and self-worth) but leveraged or even enhanced.
A public enemy must be zealously loathed; hated and reviled (he/she is a grouchy kauchiti/nankafubwe needing total weeding out or complete obliteration from earthly existence to borrow from the common parlance of advertisers of pest busters).
The Mutharika leadership (and those before it) has resisted pressure from ‘above’ (foreign aid donors) as well as from ‘below’ (concerned citizens and civil society) to unreservedly embrace enhanced transparency and accountability initiatives (TAI’s) aimed at improved democratic and developmental outcomes.
How else do you explain the actions of a president who talks about fighting corruption (however idly) and writes about the primacy of the truth (however feebly) but vigorously fights any effort to make a corruption-busting body truly independent and swats any attempt to pass any meaningful access to information (ATI) bill bearing in mind that, in terms of fiscal transparency and accountable democratic governance, the right of citizens to know how their government spends their hard-earned money underpins an important element of good governance and access and availability of good information on budgets is important for better governments as this enables public debate which may improve resource allocation leading to better decision-making and reduced corruption; and it also may enhance social consensus on difficult trade-offs in the context of limited resources and multiple demands? The right to information must be interpreted to be a component of the right to the freedom of expression which is given expression by section 35 of our Republican Constitution, the ‘supreme’ legal tool, as citizens can not express their ideas if they do not have enough information to do so
We have a robust enough legal regime (the Republican Constitution, the Corrupt Practices Act, the Assets Declaration Act and other related reports on corruption in Malawi) to fight our Public Enemy No.1 given the tools at our disposal are the same tools used to successfully fight the vice elsewhere! It is our legal fraternity that often frustrates our efforts by giving ‘legal interpretation and effect’ of the law for which it was not crafted and electing to embrace some ‘armchair speculations’ of the law for their own corrupt good or incompetent good.
The inescapable reality is that corruption is ever ‘infesting he Malawi society, economy and polity with new velocity’ as ‘moral shortfalls in the standards of leadership and lack of integrity among our pseudo-leaders in both the private and the public sector ‘continue tumbling and with it the biting effects of corruption that include ‘investor and capital flight, economic inequalities, poverty, inefficiency, unemployment, donor fatigue, social decay, poverty, social violence, worsening mal-governance and private sector decline’ that have become accepted in most circles as a normal way of life in the country
We oftentimes say a tree is judged by the fruits it bears and the fruits it does not bear, so too, power holders and duty bearers are held responsible for commissions (efforts made) and omissions (efforts not made). Let us make corruption Public Enemy No. 1 to bequeath generations after us the good we were bequeathed by generations before us.