You can’t blame the opposition for their anger
No one can blame the opposition leaders for the catcalls they have been making on President Peter Mutharika to resign, following his empty speech during the opening of the 46th Session of Parliament. The speech was short in all aspects: depth, scope, substance and utility value.
It fell short of tackling pertinent issues the country is facing. It is true the President did not deliver a State of the Nation address. But his speech was out of sync with people’s expectations. He had no business going to Parliament to defend himself on his failures instead of spelling out concrete direction on how government intends to tackle economic and social issues the country is facing. And they are many.
Malawi is facing teething problems from all fronts. These can only be solved if the President first acknowledges them before he can begin to call upon everybody to play their rightful role to solve them. But as it turned out, the President’s speech was only a good recipe for more time wasting in Parliament. The President should have set the agenda by first showing concern that all is not well. And that he is part of the problem. It is not a weakness when a leader admits he has failed to find lasting solutions to problems he is supposed to have solved. It shows a discerning mind. And you don’t begin by blaming everybody for problems you have failed to solve and then seek sympathy from the same people to help you solve them.
Malawians are not daft and they should not in any way be underrated on anything. Take the looting of government funds by civil servants and businesspersons, for example. This is an old cancer in Malawi that has eluded many previous governments as revealed by the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) findings.
Admitted, what has come to be called ‘Cashgate’ was first exposed in 2013. But the truth is that the country has been losing billions of kwacha year in year out for decades. On numerous times the media has written about the existence of ghost workers in the civil service. And former Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) FahadAssani told both the Muluzi and Bingu administrations that as much as a third of the national resource envelope goes down the drain through theft and fraud. But the powers that be just looked aside or at worst Assani’s observation expedited his removal as DPP.
The 2013 ‘Cashgate’ therefore is an eye-opener in as far as exposing and fighting corruption in high offices is concerned. If it were not for the ‘Cashgate’ no one would have known the dizzying K577 billion fleeced in similar fashion between 2009 and 2014 as revealed by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Yet listening to the President in his address to Parliament last Friday one would be made to think that ‘Cashgate’ has been upon us only since 2013 and that it is the genesis of all the ills dogging his administration. As posterity has started proving all and sundry, the 2013 ‘Cashgate’ is only a tip of the iceberg. It laid bare the rot that has been around in this country for decades but which the powers that be only paid a deaf ear to or were keen to sweep under the carpet because they were accomplices to it.
So when the opposition are saying the President seems clueless about what his speech should have tackled, you cannot blame them. The ‘to-do-list’ the President’s speech should have chronicled by way of suggesting sustainable solutions is long. As we are talking now, the Farm Input Subsidy Programme is in a mess, lending rates are going up, inflation is rising—diminishing people’s buying power—power outages are increasing threatening to choke the manufacturing sector further, water shortages are the order of the day. Drugs meant for public hospitals are stolen and sold on the black market; public hospitals are overcrowded; unemployment is soaring, three million Malawians need to be fed by government; armed robbery has become the DNA of survival for some of the unemployed; with the onset of rains disease outbreaks are imminent, to name but a few of the issues which should have been exercising the President’s mind. But instead he is wallowing in cheap propaganda—the blame-game, to divert people’s attention from the real problems. Surely the President could have done better. I can’t fault the opposition for their anger.
