Emily Mkamanga

Listening to voice of reason

The beauty about democracy is that it comes with various freedoms.  One of the freedoms that democracy brings is freedom of speech, or freedom of expression. During the dictatorship such freedom was restricted.

One could hardly express himself or herself even if they disagreed with the government and its leaders. In fact, the leadership and those people with power did not bother to listen to what ordinary Malawians were saying.

In defence, some people would say that there was freedom of speech. What they forget is that for freedom of speech to be meaningful, there must be a listener to respond or answer back.

When multiparty democracy came into Malawi in 1994 people celebrated that the meaningful freedom of speech had come. Those with power are expected to listen to people and respond accordingly. The authority must pay attention to what people are querying and answer them with reasons before making decisions.

Just like in most countries in Africa, in Malawi corruption and stealing of public resources, including money, has been killing the economy. To worsen the situation, the main problem has been to find people to courageously pin-point at the suspected culprits to take to court.

Fortunately, in Malawi there is now the Tonse Alliance administration, which encourages openness, and has found Martha Chizuma, who did exceptionally well as the Ombudsman and what she did on the investigations on abuse in some parastatals was an eye-opener.

Chizuma’s reports left no one in doubt and had shown her high standard of performance.  With this in mind, and when she applied for the position of Director General of ACB, most people had no doubt for her to get the position. It was so shocking to hear that after going through all the processes, the Public Appointments Committee (PAC) of Parliament failed her, mostly by reasons best known to themselves. 

Most Malawians were disappointed seeing their chance of getting rid of corruption stopped. The disappointment came with anger and people were willing to support the Human Rights Defenders Coalition (HRDC) which was not to take it lying down. Instead,

HRDC organised demonstrations against PAC. Even Parliament asked PAC to do the analysis of Chizuma again.  Fortunately, this time around they passed her to be ACB Director General.

Leaders must learn from Chizuma’s issue, that when the matter affects all Malawi, there are voices of reason that come from far and wide.  Probably, PAC looked at Chizuma from personal and political levels, and not national level. May be at failing her, some PAC members looked as if squaring up some old scores with her. 

The other thing is that PAC might have been following an old bad habit of pegging officials to political parties. If a candidate is said to belong to the party that PAC members do not support, the candidate cannot get through. 

At the moment, it does not need a genius to know that Malawians are more interested in getting someone to sort out the corruption and stealing of public resources. For goodness’ sake, party affiliations should not frustrate people like Chizuma from demonstrating their much-needed capabilities.

It goes without saying that when authorities have to make decisions affecting the whole country, they must not work like robots. They must put in a lot of reasoning. The people of Malawi are always alert and would not allow faulty decisions without their concerns known through their voices.

The voice of reason by Malawians will shape a good future.

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