Let us stop acquiescing to duplicitous noise—it paints a worrying moral bankruptcy unlikely to serve Malawi and its impoverished people. Our meteoric rise on Transparency International’s corruption ranking is testimony enough to our depleted moral capital and confirmation enough our immoral pursuits are adding disastrous value to our measly existence! It is also time to figure-out an ebbing moral capital translates into a squillion-fold loss in our capital wealth (from the attendant proliferation of vices—the money we directly lose from high-level corruption of all shades, the inferior value we derive from our time and effort in our various undertakings). The two-faced character of people we entrust with critical decisions for the country and its people is costing the country and its people a sizeable proportion of the country’s GDP in unrealized output, meaning any disingenuous noise from duty bearers and power holders needs to be taken seriously by impoverished Malawi and its people.
Not too long ago, our ‘learned’ President travelled to neighbouring Mozambique to join Chissano, Guebuza and Nyusi in that country’s Independence celebrations and came back in awe of what he had witnessed—describing it as a sign of the level of maturity and entrenchment of that country’s ‘democracy’ in a short span of years and something that Malawi needed to emulate. What the ‘learned’ President conveniently failed to discern was that the country has been ruled by one party (Frelimo) since independence and that opposition members were a no-show at this ‘exclusively’ Frelimo function; closer to home, the much-maligned leader of opposition was to travel to Blantyre (a few weeks later) to join the ‘learned’ President in this country’s Independence celebrations and would be un-befittingly snubbed by the ‘learned’ President at what would be an ‘exclusively’ blue function. It is disingenuous of the ‘learned’ President to deify the attendance of single-party-rule presidents of Mozambique and disregard the attendance of a genuine ‘by-product’ of ballot-box ‘democracy’ at home. And doubly disingenuous of the ‘learned’ President to preach nation building (through the much-touted three-edged pillar of patriotism, integrity and hard-work) while concurrently personalizing his rule and ‘clothing’ it, from head to toe, in DPP and MTL-belt colours. It is this kind of duplicity that is keeping this country’s statehood still-born and that needs shutting up.
Another group of people that needs shutting up is our legal fraternity that has dismally failed to give the country proper guidance in it ‘courtyard’ affairs. Their duplicitous interpretation of laws of the land have done Malawi untold harm—they have adopted a ‘textual’ interpretation of the laws of the land which has resulted in a plethora of inconsistent judicial outcomes when, a ‘purposive’ interpretation would have offered us appropriate relief and more reliable and consistent ‘courtyard’ outcomes. As a result we have failed to find lasting solutions to the country’s ‘succession-machinations’ in the President’s office, ‘floor-crossing’ conundrum’s in the National Assembly, obstructive presidential-powers interpretations, unsupported one-sided compensation claims from un-procedural dismissals, unfounded presidential immunity claims, and unsupported one-sided lost-profit claims. Some two years ago, I heard the fraternity champion the indiscriminate use of trumped-up ‘treason’ charges even in the absence of a single treason case having been successfully ‘prosecuted’ since the new democratic dispensation. The fraternity’s missteps have brought costly legal disharmony and paralysis, and engendered costly loss of trust, public disquiet, diminished confidence in ‘courtyard’ outcomes and made the fraternity a prime candidate for shutting up.
We certainly should shut-up ‘cerebral’ economists—they have dismally failed to construct appropriate templates for properly managing the fiscal affairs of the country (but now believe they can construct one for hemp use-and-sale!). The ‘learned’ Professor’s call for Presidents to stay clear of economics (because they lack expertise in the subject) is as perplexing as it is disingenuous because the ‘learned’ Professor too lacks the requisite authoritative recognition to call for the legalization of the use and sale of hemp considering that the ‘learned’ Professor was not convincing in laying bare a credible cost-benefit analysis of the pittance (economic gain) the country may derive from such legalization versus the non-monetary costs likely to stem from the legalization (the subsequent moral malaise and the larger-and-more-lasting societal dysfunction). Countries that have contemplated trying legalization have always relied on their citizens’ high regard for the rule of the law and not the rule of the party or indeed the rule of the jungle, as happens to be the case for us! Is the ‘learned’ colleague asking for a blank check to give us unintelligible solutions he barely understands himself? We certainly need to shut-up such unintelligible noise.
And we should certainly shut-up my self-righteous noise if it does not serve impoverished Malawi and its people!
Contribution by: Chisala, Maxwell L.
