DPP goes bananas

Whatever it is that these Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) zealots may be getting high on, they better stop it.

Whether it is sniffing, puffing or direct injections, it is affecting their thinking capabilities in dangerous ways.

Someone should please point it out to them that clearly the inhaled substances are not good for their health, whatever that maybe.

First it was that unelected secretary general (SG) of theirs (what’s his name?) who last week tore to pieces the whole DPP manifesto and the Public Service Reforms Plan, picked up a lighter and set fire to the little pieces before spreading their ashes all over Capital Hill.

This little known SG of the ruling party—Oh yeah, now I remember his name as Eckleni Kudontoni—went on a podium in Mzuzu last weekend, opened his mouth and released some of the most stinking verbal emissions that should make every right thinking Malawian shudder with reversion.

The man claimed that there are some public officers—especially district commissioners (DCs), chief executive officers (CEOs)—of public bodies and other senior public officers who are anti-DPP; that they are working against the ruling party.

The fellow, with a grandiose, if not exaggerated sense of importance, then proceeded to threaten these folks that if they do not toe the DPP line, they better start looking for other jobs because the Discriminatory Political Party (aka DPP) will not stand for it. Now the SG is the CEO of the party. His job is to implement the policies of the grouping and when he speaks, he communicates party policy.

By spewing that filth, Kudontoni just re-wrote the DPP’s political platform in ways that are so consequential that everyone should forget that this is the ‘new’ DPP; that the reforms agenda will ever work; that whatever the administration has been espousing for the public service is one big fat lie that Kudontoni just let out.

The irony is that this is the administration that stopped departmental heads, parastatal CEOs and other officials not to follow the President around; that they should use that time to concentrate on their work and improve service delivery.

Given Kudontoni’s foul emissions, what will stop the zealots in the party from concluding that one is anti-DPP if he or she does not go to a presidential ‘development rally’?

No wonder, some civil servants rightly feared that the directive was just a trap to trick them into a political web that gives the powers that be the excuse to purge them!

And the fact that the ruling party leadership, including President Arthur Peter Mutharika, has not condemned Kudontoni means that they are in agreement.

Now that is very spooky—endorsing such inflammatory statements through silence will only embody those who take pleasure in throwing their political weight around to intimidate public workers and extract from them dubious contracts and resources for political and personal usage that is the very anti-thesis of the DPP has been selling as the reforms agenda that has now been exposed as just another DPP smokescreen.

As if this is not enough, President Mutharika has excitedly embraced a bizarre event to commemorate his arrest for a capital offence, treason.

Three years ago, APM was accused of trying to usurp constitutional powers in April 2012 after the death of his brother, Bingu wa Mutharika.

APM and others, including some people currently in his Cabinet, were accused of plotting to take over government unconstitutionally by trying to stop then Vice President Joyce Banda from ascending to power while working to install themselves into the top seat, which led to their arrest.

After winning the presidency in May 2014, APM cleansed himself of the offences when the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) dropped charges against him and his cronies.

APM and his bunch were never fully tried by the courts of law and were not cleared of the charges. It was a political decision.

But somehow, APM and the DPP want to immortalise that day as if APM and his friends were some sort of heroes and future martyrs, yet they were suspected criminals.

They now want to commemorate the day and, who knows, some bright bootlicker may even propose, and get the presidential nod, that the day APM was arrested should be declared a national holiday!

And given how enthusiastic the President appears to be about all this drama, he may just endorse it.

Now, this is a President whose government is so broke that it cannot pay salaries, is unable to finance its ministries, departments and agencies; is keeping hundreds of thousands of flood victims waiting for help at a time the floods disaster budget has a huge deficit that the administration has not yet figured out how to fill.

Yet, all the ruling party can think about is how to turn APM into some sort of a sacrificial victim to whom the country should be eternally grateful. For what?

Meanwhile, the party itself is disintegrating due to infighting over leadership and succession problems, multiple levers of power and the paranoia that someone is becoming too powerful and too popular for doing a job that has helped to prop up the party’s image that, before his cerebral work, was in tatters.

Instead of trying to pull the party together, the President is being chaperoned into ridiculous circuses.

As I said, whatever it is that the DPP is inhaling or injecting itself with is not good for them—and the country for that matter. They have gone completely bananas.