The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) remains muted on whether it has investigated a complaint lodged five years ago by High Court Judge Esmie Chombo who had reported to the Malawi Law Society (MLS) that lawyers were allegedly colluding with court clerks to destroy court documents.
In a letter to MLS dated January 18 2018, Justice Chombo, who was then the Lilongwe Registry judge president, but now retired, complained that some lawyers were paying court staff to “misplace or destroy court files to frustrate case proceedings”.
In 2021, Justice Chombo, speaking through the then registrar of the Malawi Supreme Court of Appeal and High Court of Malawi, Gladys Gondwe (now a judge), said that she had received no feedback on her complaint.
MLS president Patrick Mpaka said in an earlier interview that when MLS received the complaint from Justice Chombo, the office bearers of the lawyers’ body, then headed by lawyer Khumbo Soko as president, referred the matter to ACB for an investigation.
But Mpaka, in a WhatsApp response last week, said he was not aware of any recent updates on the issue and requested more time to check.
In a telephone interview on Thursday, Blantyre-based lawyer and former MLS president, John-Gift Mwakhwawa, said that MLS is at the mercy of ACB, adding that the lawyers’ body is ill-equipped to undertake such a probe on its own, especially since no names of the errant lawyers were mentioned.
When Weekend Nation sent a questionnaire to ACB spokesperson Egrita Ndala last week, she indicated that she was sourcing information, but no response has been received as we went to press last night.
Governance expert Charles Kajoloweka has criticised ACB for its inaction, describing it as an example of failure by law enforcement agencies to address deep-rooted impunity within the justice system.
In an interview on Thursday Kajoloweka said: “One would expect that such a call for action from a judge would be treated with the seriousness it deserves, given that it comes from a place of information and evidence. The ACB needs to account for such inaction.”
However, Kajoloweka, who is also the executive director of Youth and Society (YAS), said he is aware that ACB’s attempts to address corruption among some lawyers have been thwarted by questionable injunctions from certain judges.
He said: “It is a scheme to protect ‘corrupt vendors of the justice system’. As we address judicial accountability, we must remember that lawyers are at the heart of corruption facilitation. They are the midwives of corruption in the justice system.”
Agreeing with Kajoloweka, Centre for Social Accountability and Transparency executive director Willy Kambwandira, suggested that the silence from the ACB indicates collusion between law enforcement agencies.
“The bureau’s inaction on this and other cases clearly shows that it is compromised and has a conflict of interest. It appears to serve the interests of a few privileged Malawians at the expense of the majority,” Kambwandira said.
He added: “One could speculate that the ACB is even more corrupt than corruption itself. It is high time that both the ACB and the judiciary are subjected to serious levels of accountability.”
In her letter to MLS, the judge had also complained that court reporters and secretaries were abandoning legitimate court work to do typing and printing for some lawyers who offer them money for the services, a development which she said was “clearly unacceptable”.
Over the years, court processes in the country have been riddled with missing files or missing pages in case files, misplacements of files, a development which Justice Anaclet Chipeta, now retired, in a past interview with Weekend Nation, cited as one of the reasons that lead to delays in justice delivery in the country.
