By Frank Kamanga

President Arthur Peter Mutharika  (APM)and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) are a mortal threat to the opposition.

The opposition and their backers masquerading as Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and social media pundits can’t face APM and DPP on policy.

They can’t stand stand them on delivery of development. They shudder at the shredding DPP will hand them at the elections.

So to try to stop it, the opposition will twist truths to turn them a smear against Mutharika and the DPP hoping that this could break them. DPP and APM are unbreakable!

Being made an issue now is the non-issue of donations to the DPP.  All political parties in the country survive on donations. Yet only donations to the DPP are made an issue. It is a sheer waste of time.

PRECEDENTS ON VEHICLE REGISTRATION

The five pick-up vehicles were donated to DPP. Not to Mutharika. The party admitted in the story which The Nation published that it was using the vehicles. So while they were registered in the name of President Mutharika, he is not the one using them. There was no personal gain.

And this mode of registration has never been an issue:

 –Former president Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda had many of MCP assets and vehicles registered in his name.

–Dr Bakili Muluzi had 63 UDF vehicles registered in his name.

–Joyce Banda had 30 of People’s Party vehicles registered in her name; 22 of them were a donation.

–Saulos Chilima has 16 of his group’s vehicles registered in his name.

LAWS ON DONATIONS

As for the legality of donations, it is common knowledge that there is no law that criminalizes donations to political parties. All over the world, political parties survive on donations.

Actually, Malawi’s own Political Parties Act formalizes donations to political parties. It provides for two forms of political financing to political parties.

According to the Act, the first source is  state resources. This is the case of political parties that have representatives in Parliament. The law provides that a political party which has secured more than one-tenth of the national vote in parliamentary elections shall be entitled to be provided with funds by the State to ensure that, during the life of any Parliament, it has sufficient funds to continue to represent its constituency.

The other form of financing is what the law calls private sources. According to the law, political parties will be able to source funding from private sources—especially from its membership.

It says a registered political party may, for the purposes of financing its activities, appeal for, and receive donations from, any individual or organisation, within or outside Malawi.

In other words, there is nothing illegal for any political party to receive any donation from anyone. As long as the donation does not end up benefiting an individual.

This is what we saw on the K145 million issue. The opposition and their loud-mouthed propagandists thought they had a smoking gun when the issue came out that DPP had received that financial donation – through President Mutharika.

They were disappointed to learn that there was nothing illegal about that donation. They turned their hate at the Anti-Corruption Bureau for clearing President Mutharika.

The ACB came to the conclusion based on the facts made available to the Bureau and not on feelings of the smear propagandists.

On examing the records, ACB Director Reyneck Matemba concluded thus:

“Bank documents and other documents that we have, some of which were provided to us by the State President himself, clearly show that the ultimate beneficiary of the K145 million was the Democratic Progressive Party and not the State President.”

The issue is that the opposition will wage a propaganda war against Mutharika and the DPP as they try to find a way to disrupt DPP’s march to victory in elections next year.

They will deploy the usual hate-filled, jealousy-coloured tricks to waylay Mutharika, to infuriate him.

MAN OF INTEGRITY

None of their tricks will succeed because it is not easy to put President Mutharika down.

Mutharika is in that job not to earn a living. If he were, he would not have gone almost five years while taking a reduced salary, leaving the rest for Treasury to spend on public services.

President Mutharika is the first Malawi leader to go almost five years while taking a reduced salary.

When he took over government in May 2014, APM found the presidential salary at K2.7 million per month. He decided not to draw that salary and instead directed that he would be receiving K1.5 million monthly. He directed that the rest should remain at the Treasury so that it can be spent on public needs.

In October 2016, the salary of the President had risen to K3.8 million. Again, the President decided to continue drawing that same MK1.5 million.

That is, APM has been sacrificing more than MK14 million of his salary every year for the money to be spent on other public needs.

That is how good Mutharika has been. And whatever propaganda you create, you cannot put a good man down.

Mutharika’s hands are clean. He is in that job solely to play his part towards the transformation of Malawi. And he knows what INTEGRITY means to that transformation process.