Debate recording played in House amidst disagreements

The National Assembly briefly operated like a courtroom for about half an hour last Wednesday when a recording was played of the angry exchanges among some members of Parliament (MPs) during a heated debate in the House on Monday.

The altercation involved several people but attention was on the exchange between Minister of Natural Resources, Energy and Mining Bright Msaka and Mzimba West MP Harry Mkandawire (Peoples’ Party –PP).

The latter insisted that he had said Raiply Company in Chikangawa Forestry Reserve owed the Government of Malawi billions of kwacha, and yet the government was not pressing the company to pay up. However, Msaka said he took great exception to Mkandawire’s second statement on the matter, which, he insisted, purported that the Raiply

Company “owned the Government”.  He said he wanted to correct that statement, for the sake of proper record-keeping. At the height of the heated argument earlier, the minister demanded that an official print-out of the recording be made available for him to prove the point that Mkandawire had used the word “owned”. But all the while, the MP vehemently denied he had uttered the word “owned”.

To many members, the recording did not seem to clear the cloud on the matter. And when First Deputy Speaker Esther Mcheka Chilenje asked the minister to restate his query, he expressed regret that Parliament had felt like a courtroom and that the trivial matter of semantics, and probably the case of a loose tongue, had wasted the House’s time. Closing the matter, Mcheka-Chilenje also regretted that worthwhile debate time had been lost on the trivial issue.

She said: “However, I have a word:…We should observe the rules of debate in the House. Let’s observe decorum in the House. Decorum is very important.

“Let us refrain from being provocative when debating.”