Why Vincent Wandale has been tolerated
There is a growing body of opinion that the DPP government has tolerated Thyolo rabble-rouser Vincent Wandale to cause trouble for so long because he is from Thyolo and that the party did not want to upset its power base in the so-called Lhomwe Belt
For those of you that might just have come into this country or reading this online from any part of the world, let me fill you in with some background.
Wandale comes from Thyolo, a tea growing district where President Peter Mutharika also comes from in southern Malawi.
Large swathes of land in Thyolo and neighbouring district of Mulanje have been largely occupied by big tea estates and they are mostly foreign-owned.
It goes without saying therefore that the locals, most of whom work on the estates as tea pickers, naturally envy the land that the tea estates occupy and would want some of it.
Wandale has capitalised on this and he has been spewing hate towards foreign-owned estates and fermenting a revolution over the people to forcefully take over the land from the tea estates owners, Zimbabwean style.
He even did the unimaginable and declared Thyolo and Mulanje a united independent state from Malawi.
The response from the DPP government to all this outright treasonous acts and machinations from Wandale has been to tolerate it until last week.
The Ministry of Information said government did not want to create a hero out of this madness.
I say today the ministry was damn right that government did not want to create a hero out of Wandale’s lunacy.
But it is precisely through that tolerance of Wandale madness that the government also fashioned not a hero but a monster out of this man.
Any monster needs to be fed and Wandale got tacit encouragement from a government that was mute and did not do anything substantial about the lunacy he was perpetuating.
That is why when he was arrested on Saturday he called it an act of war because he is a supreme leader of some united country somewhere within Malawi and quoted some imaginary UN convention which protects him from arrests.
Only a crackpot of a person would spew such nonsense, in my view.
The guy sounds more or less like Muhammed Shekau, that lunatic leading Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria and responsible for the most abominable acts against innocent civilians in that part of the country.
The man is downright nuts. He speaks as if he is high on something and should have been arrested long time ago just to teach him manners that you do not just wake up one sunny morning and declare your village independent from a sovereign nation. It is treason.
But the DPP said they did not want to create a hero.
I can tell that if this Wandale was from another part of the country, let us say the North, the whole government machinery would have descended on him and crush him once and for all.
Remember how the DPP government gets worked up every time some character or organisation from the North mentions proposals about any other form of government such as federalism.
It is as if someone is proposing that they overthrow the constitutionally assembled government of President Peter Mutharika
Government would make sure that the spirit of such individuals and bodies is broken by using divide and rule tactics. They would even bribe the leadership of the organisation just to silence them into submission.
Wandale has simply capitalised on a common problem of land which is in foreign hands in this country to further his own macabre agenda.
In the end, he has made innocent people, including women and children, who he was cheating he would give them land, suffer the inevitable consequences of spending days in stinking and filthy Police cells.
But this is what happens when you have a government that uses selective methods of applying the laws.
It creates monsters and untouchables such as Wandale.
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