PP governor demands secession of the North

People’s Party (PP) provincial governor for the North, Christopher Mzomera Ngwira, has questioned simmering calls for a federal government, insisting “what the Northern Region needs is, actually, secession”.

Ngwira voiced the stand on Thursday after meeting the former ruling party’s leaders from districts and constituencies in the North at his office in Mzuzu for the first time since the May 20 Tripartite Elections.

Having discussed why the party failed to retain the presidency two years after its founder Joyce Banda succeeded Bingu wa Mutharika, he told the press the voting pattern since the restoration of democracy in 1993 confirms the first-past-the-post electoral system has left the country fractured by regionalism.

This might be another PP endorsement for a 50+1 system proposed by the Public Affairs Committee, but Ngwira’s position subtly contrasts with his PP vice-president Harry Mkandawire.

In June, Mkandawire, who heads the party in the North, stunned Parliament when he called for a federal government since the ongoing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration’s first Cabinet was overly dominated by ministers from the South where President Peter Mutharika comes from and got massive votes.

But Ngwira argues that any federal system would leave “a lagging North controlled, financed and audited by the same hands that have often sidelined it when it comes to public appointments and development projects”.

In an interview, he argued: “Northerners do not need a federal State, but secession. Tingogawanapo basi. The North should be allowed to have its own nation and flag as well as to celebrate its own heroes and set its own agenda.”

PP presidential candidate Banda earned the majority of her votes from the North, confining Malawi Congress Party (MCP) president Lazarus Chakwera to the Centre and DPP’s Mutharika to the South.

If granted, allowing the region to decide its destiny would lead to the birth of the continent’s 55th country after the split of Sudan and Southern Sudan in July 2011.

But the creation of a standalone nation has never been short of critics within the region. Last month, Paramount Chief Kyungu of Karonga, himself a political science and foreign policy scholar, said the calls are “too late and likely to cause conflicts in the country where unity and intermarriages are widespread”.