Not betting on Chakwera’s sincerity
Martyrs’ Day was an annual diet of solemnity, tears and suffering during Malawi Congress Party’s 30 year regime. It was a pointed reminder of the needless and brutal bloodletting which the colonialists had inflicted on a subjugated but determined people.
Our fight for freedom—or what passed for it for 30 years—had not been a matter of right but of a will of a people determined to attain self-rule.
The solemnity of the occasion, however, went with the referendum ballot on June 14, 1993; what still hangs around is the feeling of loss and gratitude for the sacrifices the martyrs made.
These days, Martyrs’ Day is like any other holiday. Occasionally, commemorations of the day are turned into a platform for political grandstanding like on Tuesday in Mzuzu.
Chief Nkumbira of Nkhata Bay is one-minded to seek justice and, chiefly, reparations from Britain for the pain and the tears of March 3, 1959 which are still flowing and burning down the cheeks of families whose defiant relations were mowed down ruthlessly by colonial forces at the district’s jetty.
Since 2013, the good old chief has begged the government to remind the British to pay up, no doubt and in no small measure inspired by the events in Kenya where victims of the Mau Mau Uprising were compensated by Britain.
While none of the government officials present elected to appoint themselves emissaries on behalf of the victims, MCP president, Lazarus Chakwera, rushed to the fore to appoint himself activist, to the chagrin of some of us.
Lest we forget a few issues. The massacre took place in 1959. Within five years, MCP, Chakwera’s party, was in charge. For the next 30 abusive years until 1994, MCP saw no wrong and sought no reparations. If Kenya had not brought about this political reawakening, where that would have placed the victims, I have no idea.
Get me right here. I am not saying the victims don’t deserve compensation. They do and it’s long overdue. It is the identity of the activist that is awkward. MCP has too much excessive baggage to turn activist, especially on a matter as delicate and emotional as this, just at the flip of a coin.
For 30 years, MCP’s cared for the victims of British brutality as much as a cat concerns itself with a stricken mouse. For 30 gruelling years, MCP set about inflicting the kind of abuse on its own people so severe that the wounds are yet to heal for some.
A few weeks ago, Malawi News reported the case of Elton Patel who was exiled and stripped of his property by MCP. Forty years on, he is destitute and theoretically displaced. If Chakwera needed a cause, any cause at all, that would have provided that cathartic experience, he would have been by Patel’s side, hearing his story and seeking justice on his behalf. But he has conveniently ignored him, which is an indictment of the whole charade of a changed MCP.
Come to think of it, Nkhata Bay is littered with people who suffered MCP’s brutality for the sin of hailing from the same district as the regime’s ‘arch-rebels’: Orton Chirwa and Kanyama Chiume. Few have been compensated, some because their losses were unquantifiable while others because the National Compensation Tribunal either run out of funds or it folded up before they could make their claims. For others like Patel, the compensation was so derisory as to have no meaning.
While we are it, one wishes he took up, with the same gusto, the cause of victims of contemporary brutality, like the 20 people of July 20 who were mercilessly hewn by a regime afraid of its own shadows, much like the MCP itself, which for 30 years saw demons where none existed.
Would Chakwera take up their cause with the government or allow their case to disappear in the labyrinthine of history as a necessary sacrifice for democracy? I wouldn’t bet my sleep on the former.
