Is it not curious that President Peter Mutharika has suddenly become a spokesperson for the UDF?

If you have been following the DPP/UDF marriage saga, you will have heard the president insisting that the marriage will continue, apparently in spite of loud protests from a lone and forlorn Lucius Banda.

Now, to me, Mutharika being the one making statements about the state of the marriage tells me that this conjugation is not consensual but rather a violation. In rape cases, it is almost invariably the man that does all the talking, justifying and claiming that the act was consensual. The woman is usually too shocked or embarrassed to say anything.

I am at a loss for a sensible explanation for the silence of Atupele Muluzi as regards his party’s marriage – or so-called working alliance – with the DPP other than he is too confused and shocked about this violation.

Furthermore, why is no one from the UDF saying anything about the status, nature and benefits of this alliance?

There was a time when the United Democratic Front (UDF) was popular. When it was formed in the early nineties, the UDF carried the hope of many Malawians. The Lamp logo that represented the UDF back then was not put on the brilliant yellow background by accident. It was because of the dreams and the hopes that prevailed at that time and epitomized that Party. This hope and belief was that a new day had dawned on the country’s landscape. Democracy was the buzzword, flanked tightly by unity and tolerance.

This promise was the UDF that came to power in 1994. Unfortunately, that UDF disappeared soon after the 1994 elections. What immediately emerged in its place was a different UDF that was selfish and intolerant of criticism and differing opinions. It was a UDF where democratization of corruption, outright petty thievery and a wholesale plunder of national resources replaced the notion of liberal democracy. The hopeful promise of a better economy, freedom and an absence of repression soon flew away to be replaced by a foreboding of helplessness and bleakness.

This was clearly demonstrated by the many learned, intelligent and patriotic Malawians who, having caught the Malawian freedom and democracy fever, came back to Malawi in 1994 to offer their knowledge and expertise in various ways to the newly elected Muluzi administration.

Alas for these well-meaning sons and daughters of the motherland, the Muluzi administration turned its back on them.

They asked too many questions about how the National Compensation Tribunal funds were being used, they quizzed the administration too much on why the vendors situation was being allowed to proliferate in our cities, and they differed too much with the administration’s primary agenda of enriching themselves first before healing and rebuilding the country. They came, they saw, and failing to conquer, made a quick exit back to the west where they had come from.

It was clear from then on that the country would survive on nothing but grace alone. As a deaf ear was given to all voices of reason and a blind eye to all suggestion of a better way to follow, the Muluzi administration plunged itself into a labyrinth of political myopia that continued its downward spiral through to the end of that administration’s ten years of office, and has now come to a head.

It is important to understand that there are no such things as political accidents- only catastrophic clangers and monumental mistakes resulting from pathologic political myopia.

It should have been clear to Muluzi and the UDF leadership that the advent of multi-party politics in 1994 had changed the Malawian mindset and ushered in a new era of political enlightenment. Multi-party Democracy was not a license to plunder national resources. It was not a blank check to enrich oneself at the expense of the nation. It certainly was not an opportunity to concentrate one’s power to the extent where the power went into one’s head and blinded one to the time-tested edicts of strategic politics- idealism, continuity and credibility.

My questions to the UDF leadership remain. Where is the democratic ideal when UDF members are neither consulted nor allowed to speak regarding important working alliances with government? Where is the continuity when new blood cannot be allowed to climb the upper echelons of the party because the leadership is forever reserved for the chairman and his son? And where is the credibility when development rhetoric coined and “agenda for change” is devoid of a grasp of the real issues facing the nation and their proposed answers?

Once the UDF leadership became myopic to the fundamentals, it lost direction, gave up the vision and followed the downward path to its ultimate end of hero worship, disproportional concentration of power and dictatorship.

The cause of the problems and indeed the disintegration of the UDF can be traced to the moment its national chairman became bigger than the party. When all power was concentrated in the then President of the party, he began to see himself as a god and began destroying the very foundations upon which the UDF was built. The writing on the wall regarding the fate of the UDF was clear when Muluzi began to alter the constitution of the UDF to favor his intention to rule indefinitely, and later even tried to change the republican constitution for the very same self-serving reasons.

In the final analysis, it is political myopia that has decimated the once mighty and promising UDF.

The final nails into the UDF coffin are now being hammered as the UDF national chairman literally offers his party to one ruling government after another for rape and violation, all with his consent and under his supervision.

That the very founder of the party himself can now shamelessly orchestrate the political rape and violation of Atulepe Muluzi, the figurehead leader of that party, is as shameful as it is disturbing.

Will the UDF now only be nothing but a party that that settles for clearly unworkable alliances and marriages of convenience?

The desperation now haunting the UDF is a clear indication of the cracks in the party’s foundational ideals and its integrity.

As the party continues to plough ahead on a semblance of democracy in spite of the loss in any sense of direction and focus, it is now blatantly clear that the UDF is coming apart at the seams. As once well-established principles, values and ideals are now being replaced each passing year by the personal expediency and convenience of the few, and the word of its national Chairman remains law, a once powerful democratic champion has now clearly accepted its fate: a one-way trip into oblivion.