Abuse of office knows no gender
There are a myriad of lame excuses that President Joyce Banda can rope into her vain arguments on why she cannot simply pick a phone and order the Speaker of Parliament to make public her declared assets, but anything to do with being a female leader is way out of the line.
Which is why I was perplexed when, after being implored to publicise her assets, Madam President—who had somewhere in her statements challenged that she was not dumb—ended up pitching one of the dumbest gender-related arguments—that she was tempted to “look at the demands as a gender issue,” just because her male predecessors faced no such pleas.
The futility in this type of logic is confusing. Should Malawians really fail to ask a sitting female President relevant questions just because the same were not asked to former male heads of State?
Being the first female president of the country, President Banda can do herself a favour by addressing the legitimate issues in question, instead of trying to attract public sympathy the wrong way by advancing the “because I am female” argument which does not help but ridicule the gender movement in the country and the world over.
When a sitting President refuses to come out in the open about her wealth, what most citizens worry and think about is the safety of public coffers. Whether the President is a man or woman is immaterial because plundering public resources does not come with a gender tag.
As witnessed by the recent looting at the Accountant General’s office, stealing from the public purse does not require one to be a man or woman. Rather, it is about how one is positioned in the public system; hence, the pressure on the holder of the highest office in charge of public resources—regardless of their gender—to declare their assets in the spirit of transparency and accountability.
Very few, if any, really care about the gender of a sitting President, but instead, worry about the manner in which the country is being governed and how public resources, towards which they contribute in taxes, are being expended.
As such, it can only be reasonable for presidents to detach themselves from their sex and start looking at the bigger picture of her style of leadership without unnecessarily hiding behind gender when the people that put them in office ask probing questions.
The hand-clappers might have clapped at the gender excuse; the People’s Party officials might have booed all they could, but the journalists’ questions during the President’s press conference on arrival from the United Nations general assembly were a representation of the queries that a good number of Malawians are pondering and the President can only ignore them or, worse still, peddle the disgraceful gender card, at her own trouble.
