JUSTICE is a fable. It is fiction. It is a deliberately-crafted idea giving the false aura of fairness. Justice is a status-based illusion: it beckons the rich, the powerful—the advantaged people—but shoos off the poor, the powerless—the less-privileged people in society. Justice is a phantom; a feel-good hypnotizer invented to calm the nerves of the downtrodden who, after getting enraged by the realities of life, crave for real fairness in society.
The above depiction of justice is true everywhere the world over. For Malawi, justice eludes even those that make a living by creating it, looking after it, and looking for it when it is lost. The legislators create justice. They claim to enact laws that, in all respects, are intended to birth justice. They are paid when creating justice. They make a living by creating justice.
And then comes the judges. They too make a living by looking after justice. They, every passing hour, make sure that the ‘justice’ gets served. So they grapple with reason and pass judgments that reflect the best possible ‘justice’ one can imagine in the circumstances at hand.
And then the legal scholars and legal practitioners. These too make a living by looking for justice. Legal scholars shape the legal minds. They invest a great deal of their personal life just to make sure that legal practitioners have the legal tools they need to guide the convoluted legal world to search for ‘justice’ and to serve it, and to defend it.
It is wholly surprising that with this fine array of Malawi’s sages in the name of legislators, judges, and legal scholars and practitioners, we—the ordinary Malawians roaming the streets and villages every day—still cannot really get to understand what ‘justice’ is. Of course it is not much of a big surprise that this is the case. For it makes sense—if justice can elude these sages then what more an ordinary Malawian like you and me.
It really beats logic to think that a whole house in parliament can fail to differentiate between stealing millions and stealing a chicken in terms of punishment. One can hardly make sense of the fact that our legislators agree that a person who steals millions of money should get 3 years jail term just as someone who steals a chicken worth a thousand or two. Indeed, if justice is not a phantom, then why is it the case that our good judges see sense in our legislators’ thinking?
The late Triza Namathanga Senzani was convicted of stealing MK63 million Kwacha and was given 3 years jail term. A poor villager in the remote areas get 3 years or more for stealing a chicken worth less MK5 thousand. What is justice here? When will our legislators, judges, and legal scholars and practitioners sense the injustice here and make efforts to give the phantom ‘justice’ a human face?
If indeed justice is justice according to law, why is it the case that two different people committing the same offence in similar circumstances are treated differently? Why is it the case that the state always arrests and remands an ordinary citizen suspected of having committed an offence pending investigations but when those in government are suspected of committing a similar offense they are rarely arrested or suspended from employment? What happens instead is that they remain in office to destroy evidence but a commission of inquiry is instituted to give Malawians a false air that something is being done simply to calm their nerves.
Indeed Malawians, if justice has an objective meaning then why is it that when an ordinary person defies a court order contempt of court proceedings are instituted almost immediately? But today, we witness a whole Minister of Agriculture—Dr George Chaponda who himself is a lawyer—defying a court order and no contempt of court proceedings are anywhere in sight. Is it not said that justice means treating like things alike. What we have here is selective justice which is not justice at all; a phantom of justice which treats like things differently. Unequal treatment to similarly-situated things can never be justice!
We now come to a single conclusion—justice does not actually exist. It is a fable. It is an illusion; a phantom that only the rich can see. Put differently, justice is like a prostitute, it smiles to only those with money. My fellow ordinary Malawians, let’s not fool ourselves, it is a lie that we have one-justice-for-all in Malawi, for, truly speaking, there are two different kinds of justice in Malawi; one for the poor and one for the rich.