Forgive the cliché but a day is a day too long in politics.
For Joyce Banda September 13 is her Summer Solstice, her longest day of the year, for it is this day that dramatically changed her political fortunes.
Her newly-appointed Budget Director was coming home from a night out with the boys when some yet-to-be identified people tried to cut him down. Those four bullets not only drew blood from Paul Mphwiyo’s body but also kicked open a Pandora’s Box.
The domino effect from that unprecedented shooting was breath-taking. Suddenly stacks and stacks of money started showing up in impossible places like car boots and under beds.
We trust the courts will disambiguate the linkage between the shooting of the youthful socialite and technocrat and the attendant discovery of massive plunder of public resources.
Suffice to say, however, that all pointers show that the two are connected – somehow.
Connected? Again the court, we trust, will show us how.
But cashgate, if truth be told, will be a factor in May 2014. Abiti can spin it around to sell herself as someone who uncovered the rot in government and got to the bottom of it. (That is, if she gets to the bottom of it before May 20, 2014.)
Her opponents, on the other hand, will also use the same to tell the voters that on her watch it was “open sesame’ on public resources. It was ‘anything goes’ as if there was no gate-keeper.
So cashgate cuts both ways, if you get my drift, but I am not too sure if that makes 2013 a year of break-throughs for Abiti. It looks more like annus horribilis for her in my book.
Happy New Year!
