Cut the Chaff

DPP, MCP must spare us the embarrassment

Sometimes I do take time to strictly listen to local songs by various talented artists that we have as a country.

As I was about to write this piece, one of the songs I remembered was a track by the evergreen Lucius Banda titled Dyera.

A story is told in the song of three brothers who were on a long journey to start life elsewhere having inherited a fortune from their father.

But as greed would have it, they all conspired to kill each other so that one or two of them fully enjoy the inheritance.

So, two of them formed a team and plot to kill the youngest brother. On the other hand, the younger brother disappears to buy food and puts poison in it to kill his two brothers so that he gets all the money by himself.

On arrival, the two brothers kill him. The two then decide to eat the food before proceeding to share the money.

They eat the food and they die. All the three have died. A lucky passer-by gets the fortune just like that.

It may not be directly relevant, but this is what is happening between Malawi Congress Party (MCP) and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

The ruling party and the main opposition party have become engrossed in personal and political greed that they don’t have the welfare of the public at heart.

They have no time to instil hope or to paint a picture of where this country is going, say five years from now.

In other words the only two parties with a realistic chance of running the affairs of this country come May next year—assuming the Malawi Electoral Commission’s (MEC) dalliance with shifting the poll month to September does not hold—are struggling to send messages of their policy visions for the country.

Instead, they are spending too much of what should be productive time on each other’s throats.

The blundering DPP, which has butchered almost 90 percent of its 2014 manifesto promises, is behaving like Alice in Wonderland. They can’t just show or tell what they have or will do if voted into power again.

Of course, they have launched a project here, a foundation stone there and took time to break some ground somewhere, but the whole business is so murky that there is no clear end game.

The party has not inspired and is not inspiring. It has developed cold feet on what was supposed to be its game changer promises. It is now difficult to trust whatever promise the DPP will make; including the ground breaking ceremonies that President Peter Mutharika is presiding over week in-week out.

As if this is not enough, instead of using the time it has to turn around their strategy, the DPP is spending most of its time attacking MCP instead of selling a blueprint of what kind of country they want to make if voted into power again.

Actually, when the DPP holds the so-called development rallies, it spends two hours talking about MCP and 20 minutes outlining a new dream for the country…forget about its many botched dreams.

In other words, the DPP is spending less time talking to and about Malawians and all its focus is on MCP because they are convinced it is their only enemy that can wrestle power from them in 2019.

But in so doing, the DPP is giving a raw deal to Malawians. We will take this country nowhere if all we think is the next election at the expense of development.

On the other hand, the MCP too is as uninspiring as the DPP itself. Actually, MCP is failing to convince why people should vote DPP out of power and has struggled to define itself in terms of what it represents. As a result, MCP is giving people reason to maintain the devil they know, which is DPP.

At political party level, MCP cannot handle an internal crisis, their house is in a shambles, their vision –whatever they claim it to be—remains undefined. Or is it the so-called ‘Four Corner Stones’ that they are using to purge independent thinkers in the party and those they deem not coddling party president Lazarus Chakwera enough?

So far, the MCP’s only selling point is that Chakwera can deliver a prepared speech nicely wrapped in an American accent. But his speeches are devoid of substance. Even when he criticises President Peter Mutharika’s agenda, he falls short of providing his own ideas and policy choices.

Sometimes, MCP spends so much time going after what they consider to be unfriendly media outlets and critics that one wonders whether their actual vision is a Malawi where freedom of the press and freedom of expressions are rolled back to the dark dictatorial days when they were in power in the one party State era.

And so when all the chaff is cut, I get the sense that DPP And MCP are spending too much time publicly ridiculing and attacking each other without any grain of shame.

If they are not calling each other pathological liar or mpelezi then it is about killers and prince of thieves. We don’t have time for this, for Christ’s sake.

As it stands, MCP is a hopeless opposition party. It is no better than the DPP. Both Mutharika and Chakwera lack the kind of leadership that is required in the 21st century for a country like Malawi that needs to play catch up on a number of issues.

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