“In the end,
we will remember,
not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends”

– Martin Luther King Jr.

When Joyce Banda exercised her powers and fired her entire backroom team most of us knew, save for a few faces, most of her team would make it back into her reconstituted cabinet.

Nobody expected any prizes for guessing for this was an obvious fact.

For example, it was obvious that Ken Lipenga might have had the proverbial nine lives but if he survived the axe this time around then Abiti might have seen in the literati something only her could.

Look, I have said time without number that Bingu abused good old Ken by giving him a portfolio whose core duties he knew next to nothing about. As an academic, writer, essayist and newspaper editor, Mapwiya could have sat pretty at either Education or Information.

Why Bingu placed him at Finance beggars belief. This was torture of the worst kind, if you ask me.

Well, the guy collected quite a few frequent flyer points from his obligatory junkets to Washington. (Ironically he got the boot while on one of such sojourns in DC!)

But, if truth be told, the old dude was just a passenger at Finance. The guy is on the wrong side of 50 and has been juggling words all his life. To expect him to suddenly learn to interpret figures, statistics and graphs was some form of human rights abuse.

Well, he got handsomely rewarded for his troubles, but the price he has paid, a tattered reputation, is unquantifiable.

Look, cognisant of how pedestrian the boss was at figures, some clever chaps at the ministry sexed up Malawi Revenue Authority (MRA) collection returns to make the Big Kahuna’s experimental Zero Deficit Budget look doable. Ken was made to cartoon himself before Parliament as he spewed out the figures he himself could not understand.

I can bet my last devalued kwacha that Ken genuinely did not know that the MRA tax collection figures were bolstered by commercial bank loans the first time he read them. When the cheeky George Nnesa called his bluff Ken’s protestation were genuine, that I can vouch for him.

His ‘boys’ took advantage of his ignorance at figures. I bet Joyce Banda, like me, believed Ken was innocent in the deception. But she did not help my former Editor-in-Chief by maintaining him in Finance. She should have shuffled him away from the figures.

I bet he did not even understand how this Ifmis animal works. But, as the political head of the Ministry of Finance, he had to take the blame for the ‘open sesame’ on public finances happened on his watch. He had to fall on his own sword.

Fare the well, Ken.

Almost everyone is in total agreement that Abiti could not have landed herself better hands than Maxwell Mkwezalamba as her choice of Lipenga’s replacement. The international civil servant is a tried and tested set of hands. Mkwezalamba was not dubbed ‘Africa’s Finance Minister’ for nothing when he headed the African Union Economic Commission.

But the 54-year-old technocrat will not be working alone at Capital Hill and beyond. He will have to juggle his principles against the political realities he will have to grapple with and strike a workable balance.

For instance, if Kamuzu Palace calls him to release K50 million for the People’s Party “immediately”, is he going to be man enough to ask “what for”? If a commercial bank calls him to verify whether the obscenely fat cheque some guy with a “familiar name” has brought has to be honoured, is he going to order “stop payment” and damn the consequences?

The taste in the pudding, they say, is in the eating.

Hey, while we are on the new cabinet, Fahad Assani has his work cut out for him. He famously revealed while he was Director of Public Prosecution that 30 percent of the national budget is wasted through fraud and corruption. The nation is looking up to him to perform some serious chemotherapy on this spreading national cancer.

And, hey, is it only me who thinks our leaders are sometimes discriminatory in some of their public appointments? From what I have read about her, Rachel Kachaje qualifies to book her place on the cabinet table.

But why should she be assigned the portfolio that looks after affairs of folks of her own type? Are we not being discriminatory to say that out of the 32 portfolios Kachaje is only fit to look after affairs of people with physical disabilities because she identifies with them?

By the way, why should the Gender ministry only be occupied by women as if ‘gender’ denotes ‘woman’? To the muckraker ‘gender’ simply means the state of being male, female, bi-sexual or transgender. Why departmentalise it then?

I know some clever muckraker will accuse me of contradicting myself as I have said above that good ol’ Ken was abused to be dumped at Finance while he was green at figures.

But, hey, we are talking competence here, not how we were born.

Meanwhile, can someone tell me what Eunice Kazembe’s ToRs will be at the Ministry of Good Governance? What is ‘Good Governance’? Does ‘Good Governance’ not loosely mean the desired objective of a people or a nation in conducting public affairs and manage public resource?

If you ask me, I think constitutional bodies like the Malawi Human Rights Commission, the Malawi Law Commission, the Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Office of the Ombudsman ably take care of this.

And, of course, there is the Ministry of Justice that should make sure everyone falls in line.

So what will Eunice Kazembe be doing at the Ministry of ‘Good Governance’?

I think instead of creating new, duplicitous – read: meaningless – portfolios we should be thinking of trimming the cabinet. For example, the ministries of Finance and Economic Planning and Development should go back to being one. Good ‘economic planning’ creates money for the coffers anyway.

And indeed is the core duty of the ministries of Gender, Children and Social Welfare and Disability and Elderly Affairs not essentially the same – social welfare? Why not collapsing them into one ministry?

Hey, congratulations Luscious Kanyumba for bouncing back! Your first assignment, aNgoni: open the university!