Every demo has a biggie
Demonstrations have now become a form of employment for some people. What more with the ever-increasing number of the unemployed in the country. The leaders of these demonstrations are usually people who have no particular agenda to champion except that which their paymasters are willing to pay for. While for some protests it is difficult to tell who is behind them, for others, one can hazard a guess.
Take, for example, Thursday’s protests organized by some civil society organisations (CSO) in the country’s major cities to force government to scrap presidential immunity. The CSOs are Youth Caucus, Centre for Democracy and Economic Development Initiative, Pan-African Civic Educators, the Social Revolution Movement and the Centre for Democracy Watch. They are championing an initiative called Action Against Presidential Immunity (API).
Removal of presidential immunity is one of the many items that the Tonse Alliance team promised Malawians to champion once voted into power. The item even appears on the Tonse Alliance Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) which the group’s two leaders signed on March 19 2020 as they committed pen to paper to work together in their bid to unseat the Democratic Progressive Party-led administration.
Since Tonse took over the reins of power, CSOs have held several protests mostly against the rising cost of living and government’s failure to fulfill campaign promises. Prominent among the unfulfilled campaign promises protestors have been rallying over include the Tonse government’s failure to create one million jobs, end corruption and to provide people with three meals a day.
Presidential immunity has never been anywhere close to the CSOs’ heart as an item to hold protests for until President Lazarus Chakwera stopped delegating duties to Vice President Saulos Chilima on June 21, 2022. This was after the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) listed Chilima in its report to Chakwera as one of the people suspected to have allegedly corruptly dealt with UK-based businessman Zuneth Sattar.
Against people’s expectations that he would pull a shocker to the Tonse administration for the President’s drastic action on him, Chilima had a different idea. In a national address on June 24 2022 at the UTM Party’s office in Lilongwe, Chilima told Malawians that there is this item about presidential immunity in the Tonse MOU which nobody, including the President, wants to talk about. That if the Tonse MOU was to be respected this clause in the agreement ought to be implemented to the letter and spirit of its framers.
The overall import of his statement was that if he is to face prosecution on corruption allegations emanating from his interaction or association with Sattar, then he should not be the only one. That he was being victimized because he does not have the same immunity as the State President. This message amounted to saying: ‘let’s remove presidential immunity as agreed upon in the Tonse MOU and then let’s see if we are all safe’.
This has been the genesis of all the current agitation against presidential immunity. And for the first time there is this wave of protests in the country’s major cities regarding presidential immunity by CSOs some of which we are hearing about for the first time.
Before the ACB report, the CSOs never dreamed of holding demonstrations to force government to scrap presidential immunity. More remote was where a financier for such a campaign could come from. But now, overnight, they have a windfall for the task. Money aplenty for protests from nowhere!
Every demonstration has a financier, a biggie, sitting in an air-conditioned office, watching and remotely controlling the affairs. Just for now we won’t second-guess who that biggie is.
