Political Index Feature

WRITING MUTHARIKA’S OBITUARY

In his hey political days: Was Bingu quickly judged?
In his hey political days: Was Bingu quickly judged?

Until that moment, April 5, 2012 had been a rather uneventful day. I had been sitting at my rather ancient desk, probably drafting something. I must not have been engrossed in the task at hand because as soon as the tiny red light on my Blackberry started flashing, indicating receipt of a message, my hand reached out for it. It was a message from my uncle. ‘That prophecy must have been ours after all!’ It read. ‘What are you talking about?’ I quickly shot back my heartbeat picking up a pace.

But I need not have asked really. For close to three months then, the country had eagerly been awaiting the fulfilment of T.B. Joshua’s prophecy. Now T.B. Joshua is a Nigerian teleprophet, who commands quite a significant following, especially in black Africa. It is said that in months proceeding April 2012, he had prophesied that an octogenarian president from Africa would die. I had not personally watched the prophecy as I was no huge fan of the ‘man of God’. The news had reached me nevertheless.

The teleprophet was to apparently ‘clarify’ the prophecy, stating that the old man would certainly not be from West Africa. It thus was to be the case that the search for the target of the divine prediction turned southwards.

The most likely candidates were our old but Bingu wa Mutharika and Zimbabwe’s comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe. And so in the months after the prophecy, intense attention had turned to these two old men.

Each and every public appearance was scrutinized for tell-tale signs and each and every unexplained public absence was fiercely speculated on. And so when I got the slightest inkling that the prophecy might in fact have been fulfilled within our shores.

As we all know, it turned out that the president had indeed died on April 5, 2012. After almost two days of posturing and astonishing scheming, the ruling party accepted the inevitable.

Bingu was declared dead and the hitherto sidelined vice-president ascended to the residency. She would become Africa’s second female president and southern Africa’s first. The political changes that followed then were truly seismic.

DPP, rather harshly, realised that the throne on which it had been perched in fact had marshmallow foundations. The collapse was spectacular. Folks who though not holding any elected public office, had held considerable sway over the tiny republic’s public affairs, suddenly found themselves on the peripheral. And concomitantly, those who had been in the unenviable despair of political wilderness just a couple of hours before Mutharika’s fall now revelled in new found political glory. Wondering, rather zanily, how they could ever have thought that they were staring at a cynical political cul-de-sac.

It has been two years now since Mutharika’s rather ignominious exit. And while his end was greeted with a euphoria reserved for the very worst in our society, one gets the unnerving feeling that time may just rehabilitate Mutharika’s soiled legacy. Nationalist Henry Chipembere had a point when he said that history takes long to deliver its verdict.

For indeed, the inherent contradiction in assessing the legacy of a departed president is that to some significant extent, his greatness or smallness is inextricably linked to the performance of those who follow him or her in office. For within 24 months after his death, folks are asking if he really was as bad as their feelings at his final hour had suggested.

True he was one arrogant man, but compared to the flip-flopping we have seen in our tiny republic’s administration since his death, his arrogance could almost pass for principle.

Some of his dreams for the country may have been too vivid even for the country own good, but at least he had some vision that he could articulate.  And this is quite a far cry from the pettiness and mundaneness that has now engulfed the presidency.

Bingu’s sometimes-resentment towards the West and his whipping up of nationalistic sentiments appeared rather anachronistic and desperate at times, one has to admit. But neither did he have the pitiful naivety of believing that the West epitomised a benign and altruistic Santa Claus with bags and bags of presents to dole out.

In the two years that the son of Chisoka Village eternally returned to his people, little has changed for the common man. Public service delivery remains poor; from provision of security to drugs in public hospitals.

The refreshing promise to liberalise the public airwaves has dissipated as swiftly as it was made. And the looting from the public kitty has continued unabated. If you thought the days of unelected and powerful patrons were over, you were dead wrong. What has conveniently changed is the colour. The metamorphosis from blue to orange has closed with breath-taking speed. We sure are rocking but we are not making progress.

Far from it for Malawians to try to rehabilitate the legacy of the dead. But if truth be told, Mutharika eloquently makes the case for the law’s reticence in meting out the harshest of penalties for those who fall foul of it. The vagaries of human behaviour indeed make sense of the fiction that the worst of offenders are not yet born.

For just when you have sunk so low and you are so fortified in your belief that there is no more sinking to endure, it is when someone drills even harder and lower. Somehow, just somehow, one gets the feeling that we might have been too quick in writing the Mutharika’s history.

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