Govt disowns executed ‘Malawian’

The Malawi Government has said 48-year-old Denis Namaona, executed in Indonesia over the weekend, is not a Malawian, but a Nigerian national.

Namaona was among four other foreigners who faced the firing squad over drug trafficking convictions in the Far East country.

Minister of Information, Tourism and Culture Kondwani Nankhumwa said in an interview on Monday that after liaising with the Malawi embassy in New Delhi, India, which also oversees Indonesia, he could say without a doubt that Namaona was not a Malawian, but a Nigerian who could have abused the country’s insecure passport system to acquire the travel document.

Said the minister: “Even though he had a Malawi passport, I can confirm to you that he was a Nigerian national. We have information that the Nigerian government has previously written the Indonesian government asking for his [Namaona’s] extradition to serve a life sentence in his country of origin.”

Nankhumwa added that since Namaona’s sentencing 14 years ago, no Malawian family has approached the Malawi Government to assist in his extradition unlike the case of a Malawian woman currently serving a seven-year sentence in Ethiopia on similar drug trafficking charges.

This is an indication of the porosity of the Malawi travel document processing, which is easily acquired due to the absence of a national identity system.

On the other hand, the Immigration Department has also intensified its investigations into how Namaona acquired the Malawian travel document when he was supposedly a foreign national.

Chief immigration officer Hudson Mankhwala said yesterday his office received an e-mail on January 16 2015 from the Malawi embassy in India asking them to verify the identity of Namaona, but a follow-up e-mail asking the Indonesian government to provide passport details of the man remained futile until he was executed two days later.

The Immigration Department checked its database, but without passport details for Namaona, they have been unable to verify the authenticity of his travel document, he said.

“We have no passport details to base our investigations on. But the information we have is that he was convicted in 2001. Back then we had a passport issuing system that was prone to abuse and was not electronic,” said Mankhwala.

The current electronic passport issuing system was introduced in 2010 and has since not undergone significant modifications.