Dear Judge Mbadwa,
My Lord, the expression “political Guantanamo’ has long ceased being a mere rhetorical flourish in Nyasaland; it is now an official, though unlisted, institution of the civil service.
When a new regime takes the reins, a simple, ruthless protocol is enacted: the immediate sidelining of senior officials, especially principal secretaries, directors and heads of agencies who served the defeated party.
These individuals rarely suffer the indignity of overt dismissal, which would require navigating messy contractual or legal battles.
Instead, they are reassigned to a highly remunerated yet terminal destination: polite purgatory called Guantanamo.
It is a place defined by a cushioned office, a glossy title and the complete absence of meaningful work. As I speak, My Lord, close to three score of these individuals have already been designated as new inmates.
Just imagine: the newly assigned “Permanent Secretary for Special Services in the Office of the President” is less an operational post and more a carefully packed archive.
Here, a once-vibrant, highly-paid professional is left to gather dust for five long years with their only job being to occupy a comfortable chair and await the next election cycle.
The tragic irony is that most inmates of Nyasaland’s modern Guantanamo are not hardened schemers; they are career public servants who were simply competent and conscientious under the “wrong” administration. Their subsequent inactivity is the collateral damage of partisan change.
We are funding an elaborate game of professional redundancy. Must taxpayers continuously fund this cyclical ritual, recycling experienced officials back into idleness only to repeat the performance down the line?
This practice quietly kills careers and brutally weakens the machinery of government. Every time we sideline a cohort of capable civil servants, we discard invaluable institutional memory and expertise.
The overcrowding in this holding cell is exacerbated by the continued trend of hiring politically connected Directors at the expense of career public servants, further swelling the ranks of those who must eventually be exiled.
The revolving door only confirms the damage: the former inmates, now politically aligned, are suddenly embraced and reinstated, only to sideline the previous regime’s loyalists, thus swelling the ranks of the next batch of prisoners.
It is high time we resisted consigning a Permanent Secretary of proven integrity to a sinecure simply because they served a different government.
Good luck, citizens. Keep your wits charged and your questions loud, because you are footing the bill for this expensive silence.
Yours in civic duty,
John Citizen
