Winds of channge
The past few months, discourse has been the court case in which Malawi Congress Party (MCP) and UTM have been disputing results of the May 21 Tripartite Elections.
Civil society organisations (CSOs), led by the tenacious Human Rights Defenders Coalition (HRDC), too, have been pressing since the announcement of the elections results.
In the court, MCP and UTM are disputing the decision by Malawi Electoral Commission (Mec) to declare Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Peter Mutharika winner of the elections. Outside the court, CSOs, led by the HRDC, have been on the fore organising street protests to push for the ouster of Mec’s Chairperson Jane Ansah.
This, to be honest, has been an interesting, apprehensive, and mind-boggling season of our lives. If you need proof of how the post-elections’ case has sent people to a mental vacation, you must look at how some goons have graduated to a phantom school of legal studies. Everyone is now illusionary competent to interpret the law, and credit or discredit the law. It depends on the political divide to which one is.
If you track social media— which I always do—you can easily sense the pressure that has hit the youth. Everyone is ready to defend rubbish as long as it is to defend a party one belongs to.
But in all this, what those who still retain grains of sanity realise is that we are damned because we do not look at the larger national picture. The past few weeks, we expended a junk of our time discussing what we overly glorified as Vision 2020. In our attempt to explain reasons for the failure to accomplish what we thought could be blue-print of our national progress, we skirted around the issue and ended there.
What we are failing to tell each other as a nation is that the reason that vision was blurred is that we have allowed thieves, crooks, mafias and dirty men to lord over us.
I am talking about shysters who we have entrusted in our everyday life to run our affairs.
And what is more disturbing, as I have touched on slightly in my earlier argument, these bandits are supported by people who we all thought would be rational.
Actually, and regrettably, we have sold the soul of the nation and auctioned our conscience to affiliation.
There is a bunch of pretenders who will punch the air in jubilation that the country is regressing at a supersonic speed. There is also another lot that would defend anything about the ruling party just because it has keys to the national purse.
But this tells you that we are not a people that care. We do not know anything about national progress. All we have is about ourselves.
I have deliberately digressed but allow me to go back from where I started.
The court case about the May 21 Tripartite Elections which has taken the nation off-balance is not necessarily an effort to make our country, our Malawi, a better place. This is a battle of egos inspired by raw greed.
On the other hand, I presume, some people are desperate to remain in power to evade the law while others are working so hard to have chance to dip their fingers in the national purse.
My very fervent prayer is that one day, we should have people who will look beyond the national purse and have the desire to serve. What we have had the past three decades is a gathering of certified and glorified treasure hunters who have left us poorer than before.
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