By Falles Kamanga
BLANTYRE-(MaraviPost)-They say that it is better to remain silent and have people think you are a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
The latest exhibit of this idea is playing before our very eyes through the careless press briefings that UTM keeps holding to cast aspersions on Government for the death of Vice President Chilima, despite the fact that aviation experts say that all prima facie evidence thus far points to a tragic and terrible accident.
As a case in point, this morning UTM parliamentarians and counselors addressed the press from their party Headquarters, taking aim at the Government for not doing enough or moving fast enough to find the plane in the hours it was missing and untraceable. In the midst of their unscripted outbursts, they exposed their party in three major ways:
UTM NEGLIGENCE IN SKC’S DEATH: During the UTM press briefing, Hon. Chrissie Kalamula Kanyaso of UTM revealed that she was seated at the funeral ceremony of late Ralph Kasambara when she was called to go to Mzuzu Hotel, and she went there assuming that it was to welcome Vice President Chilima, only to be told on arrival by one Joshua Valera, SKC’s Advisor, that they as UTM needed to go towards Chikangawa to look for SKC’s plane because it had crashed.
If this narration is true, it means that some people in UTM knew that the plane was missing and even that it had crashed in Chikangawa much much earlier on Monday and long before the Aviation Authorities who were busy trying to find the plane’s signal, and yet for some reason, none of these UTM people alerted the authorities or the public to share the information they had.
Not even the office of the Vice President, where Joshua Valera works and where there is a Communication Department, issued any press release to alert the public that the plane of the Vice President had gone missing, or lost contact, or crashed.
We now even know that some members of staff from the Vice President’s office who were on the ground in Mzuzu were in contact by phone with people on board that flight just before it crashed, one of them being Winnie Nyondo, who has since posted on her page that the late Vice President’s Aide-De-Camp texted her at 10:10am to report that the plane was experiencing “too much turbulence”.
It is therefore clear from the admissions of people within UTM and the Veep’s office that they were the first to know that the plane was experiencing extreme turbulence and that it had gone down.
And yet Instead of alerting the public and the relevant authorities, these people decided in their hubris to remain silent and single-handedly go down towards the vast swathe of Chikangawa Forest to find the plane, and yet today UTM is in the forefront to accuse others of being slow to act when it is clear by their own testimony that they are guilty of not acting at all to alert the public and the relevant authorities.
UTM INTERNAL POWER STRUGGLE: From the two press briefings UTM has done so far, they have exposed the fact that these pressers are not just about Chilima’s death or what UTM feel Government should have done better to find the plane sooner, but also largely about showing the public who is now taking over the party’s mantle of leadership in Chilima’s absence.
And now it is clear that there are two camps in the party. On the one side are those who, with Chilima, were working in Government in solidarity with the MCP as alliance partners, the likes of Hon. Michael Usi, Hon. Agnes Nyalonje, Hon. Vera Kamtukule, etc.
From the pressers, it is clear that these, although they are Government Ministers, have no levers of power in UTM and are now being pushed aside completely, which is not surprising considering that they all have one disadvantage in common, namely that they have never won any elected office on UTM tickets, and therefore have no UTM Constituents behind them.
The second camp is made up by those who are clearly behind and at the forefront of these pressers, the handful of UTM parliamentarians and councillors who hold elected office and have constituents, but whom SKC did not bring into Government offices with him.
And it is clear that this camp is an angry, vindictive, and militant cohort, taking advantage of the Vice President’s death to take centre stage in and control of the party in ways that even SKC clearly did not allow them to when he was alive.
Sources inside SKC’s inner circle are even shocked to see the likes of Hon. Steve Mikaya at the forefront of casting aspersions on Government in the name of Chilima, for it is no secret to anyone in UTM that Chilima did not allow Hon. Mikaya to be anywhere near him or the running of the party, and from the rabid vitrial that Mikaya and his ilk are spewing at these pressers, we can see why SKC would have distanced himself from these types, who are incidentally very susceptible to exploitation and manipulation by the DPP-led opposition.
But sadly, these toxic radicals are now in charge of UTM, and they will destroy whatever is left of the party’s appeal to reasonable moderates who form the majority of the electorate.
UTM LACK OF DIRECTION: The lack of a coherent direction that we saw in UTM while SKC was alive is now on full display in the days after his death.
While the late Vice President lived, both camps of the party were allowed to air their contradictory positions and competing visions for the party.
On the one hand, there was SKC and other UTM-affiliated Ministers speaking and working in support of Chakwera’s Presidency, projecting a cordial and even warm relationship with MCP, giving the impression that they endorsed Chakwera’s leadership and welcoming Government’s decision to discontinue Chilima’s corruption case.
And when you add to this Chilima’s full embrace and acceptance of the President’s restoration of delegated privileges to him after the case was discontinued, it is likely that Chilima did that to prepare his followers for the moment he was going to culminate this policy of continued partnership with MCP by endorsing Chakwera’s re-election bid for the Presidency in 2025.
But Chilima’s posture of support was always contradicted publicly by senior members of his own party, who used political rallies done without SKC to pour cold water on the alliance, and since Chilima never corrected them while he lived, they are now out during his funeral to trample on the bridges he worked hard to build with Chakwera and MCP, and yet there is no coherence in their outbursts about what ends they are working towards.
UTM pulled in different when SKC lived, and they are bahaving like a party in disarray, clutching at straws and groping in the dark in the wake of his death.
Similarly, while it was clear while Chilima lived that he was the only person of substance with the leadership capacity and influence over the party to steer the it into the future and give its followers hope, the pressers that UTM has done this week have exposed even more the fact that the only people left with influence and control over the party’s direction are individuals without the political capital to galvanize a national following.
The only reason their rantings are being given attention is because of SKC’s funeral, because even in death, these people cannot bring UTM national attention without SKC.
Otherwise, one expects that once SKC is laid to rest and his death is no longer a current affair for these UTM political opportunists to exploit, they will likely only succeed in reducing UTM to a Ntcheu party at the risk of being prostituted to the DPP.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are those of the author not necessarily of The Maravi Post or Editor
