Where’s Malawi we ditched Kamuzu for?

Hon Folks, it’s not right—and definitely not anticipated in the democratic dispensation—for government to tax the little its hard-working citizens leave behind in death and appropriate the remainder.

The deceased estate, once gone past the statutory rituals, should belong to the rightful beneficiaries as stipulated in a will, or, where there’s no will to guide the process, the widow, orphans and, if need be, other family members. Not government.

If APM, his Cabinet and government, as humans, agree that it’s not right to rob the dead of their estates or, conversely, widows and orphans of their inheritance, then there should be a high-level apology for the many lives ruined due to government’s failure to settle 1,700 deceased estates since 2008.

Government should also settle in full—not in nominal but real terms after factoring in depreciation and possibly cost of borrowing—the K80 million total value of the deceased estates which the Administrator General admit should have been settled by 2008 but until now, not a penny has been remitted.

What’s more depressing is the excuse for the non-payment.  The Administrator General says staff in the office, conniving with outsiders, swindled the account, domiciled at a commercial bank in Blantyre, where money for the deceased estates was kept.

It’s believed these heartless criminals found a way of pushing to the bank bogus claims. Talk about another ugly face of Cashgate!

What’s as shocking as it is inappropriate is the indifference of not just the Administrator General’s office but virtually the whole government machinery to the fraud after it was detected some eight years ago.

Up to now Treasury, the custodian of public funds, hasn’t been requested to replace the funds that were lost to fraud for which nobody has been held to account.

The police say they do not have any record of this fraud and they can’t do anything unless someone, after hearing that their money was stolen, go and launch a complaint with the law enforcers.

What else can be more intriguing in our Republic than this advice? Whose money was stolen, anyway? Weren’t these public funds stashed in a government account? Shouldn’t it be the Office of the Administrator General reporting to the Police or the Anti-Corruption Bureau so they can probe the case and bring the culprits to book?

Yet, for a fraud for which its own staff abused their power to facilitate the withdrawal of funds from its own account, all the Office of the Accountant General—mandated by law to be the “protector” of the estates of the dead and, therefore, completely powerless to fight their own battles—did was to look the other way as children of the deceased dropped out school for failure to raise fees.

Some of the children ended up being teenage mothers.  Some of the boys tried to support their deprived and impoverished siblings and mothers by doing ganyu, (petty jobs), a survival mechanism for those in the category of abject poverty.  Their future, for which their breadwinner—the deceased—worked so hard to secure, shattered by government.

Which reminds me of another heart-rending story of Steven Majighaheni Gondwe of Rumphi, a millionaire who was reduced to a pauper in 1981 when the Kamuzu Banda’s dictatorial regime seized all of his property,  worth over K300 million, and threw him into detention without trial.

Later, a National Compensation Tribunal, constitutionally instituted in the multi-party dispensation to compensate victims of atrocities of the Kamuzu era, heard Majighaheni’s case and determined that government compensate him with K208 million. All he got was a K20,000!

By breaking the spirit of those who work so hard to lift themselves and their households out of poverty, government loses big time on wealth generation. As the saying goes, governments don’t generate wealth. Rather, they only spend and spend the wealth their citizens generate.

Death may come to any of us and the least we can expect of a caring government is to quickly process the estate we leave behind when death beckons. The possibility that beneficiaries can be ignored for eight years sends a chill down the spine. Where’s the new Malawi for which we ditched Kamuzu?