Reports that Commander-in-Chief of the Malawi Police Services (MPS), President Peter Mutharika, has ordered the police to arrest, investigate and take to court Eric Aniva, the self-confessed ‘hyena’, for sleeping with young girls under the long-time tradition of kusasafumbi are not worth writing home about.
This merely confirms what we already knew and that, at least up until 2019, we are in trouble, and that is not all.
For the Presidential Press Secretary t o suggest the president was deluded that such vices had disappeared by mere enactment of laws like Childcare, Protection and Justice Act; Marriage, Divorce and Family Relations Act; and Gender Equality Act, exposes just how naive our leader is.
As a law professor, the least Mutharika ought to know is that: it is one thing to enact laws and another to enforce them.
If the president is this ignorant on the enforcement aspect of these pieces of legislation, then we are not only in trouble, we are up to our noses in unprintables.
For starters, this practice of a man sleeping with young girls as a passage into adulthood is not new.
Local media houses have covered it extensively; the most recent one being a 30-minute documentary, two months ago, by the Times TV under the Times Media Group.
To his credit, I completely understand the president’s missing local media reports on this and other vices happening in Malawi because he is on record saying contrary to what he preaches, he does not – for a single moment – believe in the “Best Buy Malawian” campaign when it comes to news.
No wonder it had to take our colonial masters via the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to jump-start him into such a knee-jerk but futile action.
The irony of having a president who believes in burying his head in sand, crisis after crisis, under the misguided impression that all is under control; awaking from his slumber over a ‘foreign’ report is shocking.
Locking up one ‘hyena’, as everyone knows, will not fix this challenge nor our many problems which are rooted in ignorance, poverty and misplaced priorities by the very same government that thinks arresting this ‘hyena’ is the magic wand out of the spread of HIV and STIs and outright abuse of the girl child.
What I find particularly amusing about this saga is how people we thought were intelligent are all turning out to be the dumb, dumber and dumbest.
Let me unpack this. Did you hear how the Attorney General, Kalekeni Kaphale, defended the president’s interference in the operation of MPS, saying the “power to arrest rests with the Executive, police and the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) which the president heads”?
Now contrast this with the pace at which the ACB, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the police, the National Audit Office are dragging their feet to arrest, name and shame the Democratic Progressive Party Cashgate era thieves.
Look, if indeed Mutharika wants to tell all and sundry that he is in charge of the institutions he heads, then he should admit that he is shielding his cronies and, by extension, himself, by playing hide-and-seek with the culprits of the K236 billion Cashgate that happened under his late brother’s watch.
You see, it is high time Mutharika learnt that a person cannot eat their cake and still have it.
If he can, on the strength of a BBC report, issue an arrest warrant for Aniva, what is stopping him from reading the Auditor General’s report on the Mutharika senior era Cashgate, suspending any ministers involved and letting justice run its course as has happened to other Cashgaters?
Let me move on to the woes of university students. I will give the president the benefit of doubt and assume that, as Counsel Kaphale would want us to believe, “he is in control”.
Am I wrong to conclude that the president will resolve the unaffordable fees issue only when he reads about it on BBC or some other foreign media?
Education, as everyone knows, is the greatest equaliser. Therefore, whether the president likes it or not, he has to resolve this crisis as soon as yesterday, or go into the Guinness book of records as the academic that cared the least about a whole generation’s education.
Let us, for one moment, assume that education was as unimportant as the president wants us to believe, condemn the university students to ignorance and poverty due to their being born in non-affluent families and turn the corner to focus on corruption.
Imagine that you are running a business, a poultry business. You send a boy to buy chicken feed, and he pockets 10 percent.
You send another to sell chickens, and after selling the chickens, he pockets 10 percent.
What would the bottom line be? Would you make a profit? Would the business thrive?
If the answers are no, it means you all know that corruption is why Malawi is still called and, indeed, is one of the poorest countries in the world.
Yet with respect to the K236 billion audit report, Mutharika has decided to look elsewhere, hoping that at a certain point, the loot will just deposit itself back into the national coffers to be used to buy medicines, to be loaned to needy students and provide a whole cocktail of much needed social services.
This, if the president needs to be told, will not happen in a thousand years.
And since he seems to be a bit hard of hearing is why we need a president who is aware of what is happening in the country and can take well-measured and timely decisions.
We need a president who is proactive and not otherwise. And if government ministries, departments and agencies are not performing, the president must immediately crack their whip.
This head-buried-deep-in-sand attitude is the last thing 52-year-old but poor and bleeding Malawi needs.
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