MCP NEC’s grotesque, self-defeating ploy

Malawi Congress Party (MCP) is an entity of shifting contradictions. Just when the party does something that makes one begin to think it could be the leading light on intra-party democracy it pulls-off stunts that immediately wipe out such hopes.

One is reminded that despite the democratic robs it wears to keep a veneer of democracy there is still a barely disguised heart of darkness lurking around somewhere.

You sense hints of intolerance, contempt for democratic principles and a deep suspicion that is a hangover from the old days of the ‘Special Branch’, the fearsome, vicious and vermin-like arm of Police that terrorized Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s political opponents and innocent people who just looked or spoke the wrong way.

Take the recent resolution of the party’s national executive committee (NEC) barring anyone who has not held a position in the party for at least two years from vying for positions at the August 10-12 elective convention.

That move alone has put the party’s political, legal and constitutional guardrails to the severest test in decades.

After losing the general election in 1994 to Bakili Muluzi’s United Democratic Front (UDF) and following the death of its long-time leader Kamuzu Banda in 1997, MCP was in the wilderness for 26 years.

During this time in the doldrums, its competing leaders—especially John Tembo who always saw himself as the party’s rightful heir and Gwanda Chakuamba, an establishment MCP politician who was as unstable as they come—spent their time fighting both in court and in political arenas where their members had the quintessential talent of hacking each other with panga knives instead of working together to rebuild the party and make a serious play for general election victory.

But they both failed so spectacularly that MCP was reduced to a regional party with no real prospect of making inroads into the Northern Region, let alone the Southern Region where UDF and later Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had dominant presence at presidential, parliamentary and local government levels.

Beyond its Central Region base that remained loyal to MCP because of Kamuzu who hailed from Kasungu District, folks who remained in the party from this region were really in it for nostalgic reasons, but with no real prospect of returning to government. The MCP brand was damaged and the face of the party then—the so-called die-hard generations of loyalist holdovers from the Kamuzu days—could not turn things around.

That is until a pastor emerged out of the blue on April 14 2013 to declare that he would contest for the MCP presidency. Until this day, now President Lazarus Chakwera had never been an active member of and held no position in the party.

He had spent most of his adult life as a theologian within the Malawi Assemblies of God where he was its president for roughly 24 years.

Yet, this politically inexperienced and literally MCP new comer beat 10 establishment candidates to become the party’s president by wide margins.

Some of the MCP heavyweights he beat include former chief justice Lovemore Munlo, one time party secretary generals Chris Daza and Betson Majoni, ex-parliamentarian Lytton Dzombe, former cabinet minister Jodder Kanjere, Nkhotakota Central legislator Edwin Banda, Lilongwe Mpenu parliamentarian Watson Makala-Ngozo, veteran MCP leader Joseph Njobvuyalema and director of political affairs Eston Kakhome, among others. This political nonentity beat them all.

And that was minutes after delegates to the convention rejected Tembo’s attempt to seek a third term as party leader.

Chakwera, a fresh face that represented a new MCP no longer haunted by characters from the party’s dark regrettable past, was also a new voice—both in poetry and prose—pulsating with optimism for the future and brimming with a new vision.

His first attempt in 2014 was unsuccessful, but this ‘stranger’ to MCP brought back the party into government for the first time in nearly three decades in 2020, beating incumbent Peter Mutharika with a nearly 60 percent vote haul.

Today, an MCP NEC—whose elected mandate expired some time last year—wants to lock out of leadership contentions people who may have come to the party to seek positions they believe they can serve it better exactly the way President Chakwera did more than 10 years ago.

The very people who are most likely only in the powerful NEC positions because of the rise of Chakwera from the very party obscurity they disdain today are gutting new comers to avoid stiff competition and protect their shaky positions after failing to deliver in their roles. If they have a strong record in NEC they would have no reason to fear and bar anyone.

Clearly, someone is leading a cabal that is using the NEC as a personal political enforcement machine to crowd out fresh faces and protect their discredited tenures.

If the MCP convention is coerced into rubber-stumping this grotesque, cynical plan, it could trigger the party’s disintegration and eventual electoral defeat.