Z Allan Ntata’s Uncommon Sense: MCP’s undoing exposes leadership vacuum

At a time when socio-economics are on a free-fall because of the promised but yet-to-be-seen business unusual type of governance from President Peter Mutharika and the Democratic People’s Party (DPP); every patriotic citizen expected that Rev Dr Lazarus Chakwera and his Malawi Congress Party (MCP), would step up and lead from behind.To the chagrin of those who put their hopes on the rebranded MCP to prove checks and balances on the excesses of a regime that is hell-bent at producing few instant billionaires while the rest of us wallow in poverty has been found wanting. This far, it has had neither quality nor depth.

But Malawians never stopped hoping for the best until the long protracted mud throwing reached crisis levels at the end of August and spilled over to this month.

Just to fill you in.

At a long awaited National Executive Committee Meeting (NEC), the oldest party, amongst others, made two key decisions; it suspended its elected 1st Deputy Secretary General and two of its active MPs and expelled another Member of Parliament for Salima Central, Felix Jumbe, without being heard

Now, I don’t have problems with any organization, let alone MCP, rebuking its errant membership. After all, one of the party’s cornerstones is discipline. Apparently.

But now…

All this happened in the absence of the Party’s Chief Executive Officer, the learned Counsel Gustave G Kaliwo who left the party’s headquarters, venue of the meeting, having been refused audience with Chakwera by unruly bodyguards of the latter.

And this is where the crux of the matter lies.

You see, the infighting in the MCP had gone on for some time until my friend of the Talking Blues community, in one of his entries the other Friday, awakened sleeping Leader of Opposition to take action.

So woke up he did, but the resultant action is what left me more worried.

Look, Chakwera wallows in the title, bestowed upon him by his hand-clappers, of State President in waiting. I would have thought that such an aspirant must demonstrate that he is not just like Peter Mutharika who buries his head in the sand when trouble brews. He must show decisiveness; a thing that is lacking in our incumbent. The mud-throwing taking place right under Chakwera’s nose had gone on for so long one would be forgiven to assume he was out of the country or something!

Besides, MCP, apparently a ruling party in waiting according to its faithful, must be seen to be democratic, accommodative to dissenting views and if it comes to delivering justice, natural rules must be followed to the letter.

Unfortunately, all the above attributes have been found wanting both in Chakwera and his party in the way they have handled the mud-throwing, and the resultant kangaroo-court of the NEC meeting that just dug the party deeper into abyss.

There was a glimmer of hope, when counsel Kaliwo, fighting from within, decided to pen his party boss on the slippery terrain that the party has taken. He challenged his boss to rise up to the occasion and prove, all of us, wrong.

This I found sobering.

His 9-page letter highlighted key things that I couldn’t put any better

Kaliwo soberly warned that in order to maintain his grip on the MCP, Dr Chakwera has flouted and is prepared to flout the party’s own rules regulation, throw away any voice of reason; putting his personal power interests before the good of the MCP, and the good of the nation.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is serious. It is hard to reconcile Chakwera’s breaches of MCP rules and procedures with any claim that this is a man who would be a good leader for Malawi.

With the state presidency being given a lot of powers by our constitution in its current form, the last thing one would dream for is a party president who can’t pretend to follow his own party constitution while in opposition. What more will he disregard when he occupies Kamuzu Palace with all the security and intelligence apparatus?

And when with each passing day, the dissent is growing; there is only one message: the MCP has leadership that has failed and needs to be replaced before it takes everyone to hell.

Simply put, Chakwera’s

. It is either he nobly resigns, or he seeks a fresh mandate by challenging his distractors to an early convention where his mandate can be put to the test.

His continued denial of the growing chorus against his leadership will only emphasize his unsuitability to lead the country and in the process take him, the MCP and all of us to hell.

And there is a second question: how can this guy, who is failing even to establish a legitimate mandate within his own party, three years after being elected at a convention be aspiring to get the mandate of Malawians at large to lead the country for five years?

We must be very afraid, gentlemen.

Any ‘wakuba yemweyo’ of 1994 cannot be repeated. And most recently in 2014, we did what we shouldn’t have done. We had all the signs that the incumbent was no performer, at least going by the ‘academic freedom’ debacle; but we still went ahead to elect him.

The results are there for all of us to learn from.

Our leadership crisis is way beyond MCP’s internal problems.

Now, I believe that there are many Malawians who have the capacity and the ability, and the talent to lead this country well. If you know you are such a one, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

Z. Allan Ntata

Z Allan Ntata is a Barrister of Middle Temple, Anti-Corruption & Governance specialist and author of Trappings of Power: Political Leadership in Africa. Currently an Independent consultant in Governance and Anti-corruption, Ntata has a diverse background from lecturing in law to acting as legal counsel to the president of Malawi.