With George Kasakula:
So many interesting developments have happened during the past two weeks.
There was the Cabinet shake-up that saw Vice-President Saulos Chilima being sidelined from the list and the senseless court battle, in which the State was fighting the registration of UTM, that raged and went up to the Supreme Court.
We all knew sense would soon prevail and, despite the fuss and blowing of taxpayers’ money on nothing, UTM got registered.
In the Cabinet, the issues are the ever widening political fallout between President Peter Mutharika and his vice that saw the latter missing on the list as well as the firing and hiring of some ministers coupled with the fact that only three women made it into the 20-member Cabinet.
Then there is the hiring of Charles Mchacha as Deputy Minister in the renamed Homeland Security Ministry which has caused so much consternation among some Malawians, notably Women Lawyers Association of Malawi who have presented a petition to the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC) through Chief Secretary to the Government Lloyd Muhara.
The lawyers are asking the President to fire Mchacha, arguing he should not be rewarded with a Cabinet post after he insulted female members of Chilima’s party as prostitutes during a rally in Ndirande addressed by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) vice-president Kondwani Nankhumwa.
In all this, I see pettiness dominating the statecraft of governing. We all know the Constitution says the Cabinet must consist of the President, the Vice-President and ministers.
Anything else is something and so the list is something else as explained by the President himself the other day that his Cabinet must have only those who subscribe to his policies.
The Ministry of Information released a half-baked statement on Friday to the effect that what Malawians saw on the list of Cabinet ministers was just politics and it had nothing to do with the law.
I call it pettiness, which, yes, had nothing to do with the law indeed because we all know the law.
My fear is that this pettiness is becoming pervasive on the political scene. Just listen or watch some of the speakers during political rallies.
It is total carnage and if you have children near the TV, you immediately send them away on a fake errand so they do not listen to the x-rated vitriol being spewed in the name of politics during political rallies.
Not that there is any shortage of issues.
Commissioned by the Centre for Multiparty Democracy (CMD), the Zomba-based Institute of Public Opinion and Research (IPOR) released opinion poll results some days ago whose main finding was that, if elections were to be held in August or September this year, DPP and Malawi Congress Party (MCP) would get 27 percent and 24 percent of votes, respectively.
The study also shows that the UTM is third with 16 percent of the votes followed by the United Democratic Front (UDF) at six percent while People’s Party (PP) is at five percent.
Other important points to take from the survey, as regards political parties, is that 22 percent of the voters that were sampled were undecided and that 78 percent of those sampled said the country is going the wrong direction while 79 percent believe that the economic conditions of the country were bad.
As expected, the reaction of the political parties is that each one of them wants to take out what is best for it.
DPP said it is happy with it while MCP says the opinion poll has a big margin of error.
UTM, on the other hand, says, by virtue of being on number three only four months after its formation, it means it is on the right track.
PP is over the moon with knowledge that those sampled said they trusted Joyce Banda more than any other politician.
I thought, instead of fermenting hatred among Malawians, political parties could have used the poll as a mirror that reflects on them to show their weakness with a view to improve so that they should do well in the only poll that matters come May 21 2019.
By now, they should have been dissecting and acting on some of the things the opinion poll informs such as the fact that 22 percent of those polled were still undecided on who to support.
This is a demographic that needs to be targeted with issues that matter to it.
A clever party would engage the researchers to know the reasons this demographic gave for not deciding yet and capitalise on that piece of information to target it.
The key take-home messages in the poll are that the race between parties would be too tight and that Malawians are evenly divided in their support for political parties.
More importantly, the poll says Malawians are not happy with the state of affairs in their country at the moment.
These are critical messages. The question is: How can Malawians be happy when, 54 years after independence, nothing seems to be moving right for them with poverty levels high, vices such as corruption on the rise. In fact, the country is lagging behind neighbours on everything, including infrastructure development.
The parties and their candidates have six months to improve these figures after making voters change their mind to look at them favourably.
As for the other parties such as UDF and PP, they should have known by now that a big battle is on their hands, rendering political rumours that are rife of possible alliances credible.
I thought, during the last weekend rallies, the results of the opinion could have provided fodder for these issues to feature.
Alas! What we got is the same menu with a diet of pettiness exemplified by vitriol and name-calling to sidetrack us from bread-and-butter issues that matter to Malawian families in both rural and urban areas. They are bearing the full brunt of underdevelopment and poverty.
What should pain most is that, while parties are busy fumbling in the dark and competing at shouting obscenities at each other, other countries, even here in the Southern Africa region, are making progress and its impact on their population is very telling.
The pettiness that has engulfed Malawi really sucks big time
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