Some opposition gurus are better known for their rabble-rousing than as political leaders with a solid agenda to raise the bar on the country’s democratic governance landscape. They operate more as political mercenaries than promoting transparency, accountability, and open, participatory governance processes. Such people are identifiable by their perchance for rabble rousing to compensate for their status as political minnows.
The tragedy is that by some streak of luck the demagogues easily trick proper opposition leaders to buy in their survival agendas and schemes. One problem working to the advantage of these people is that all opposition parties have ganged up against government and are speaking with one language. The only undoing of this approach to issues is that the leaders are not able to isolate chaff from grain and propaganda from facts. Consequently, opposition gurus are all seen as disorganised, trouble makers and cry babies.
A few examples will illustrate this.
Without first doing some background check, opposition leaders stormed the National Registration Bureau (NRB) off ices in Lilongwe on Wednesday after they had been ‘tipped’ that there was production of national identity (IDs) cards for purported rigging of elections. They included legislators and party leaders from Alliance for Democracy (Aford), UTM Party and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
They went to the warehouse which belongs to the National Food Reserve Agency (NFRA) but is being rented by the World Food Programme and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for NRB with full confidence that they had uncovered a grand rigging scheme. But it turned out they had been sold dog meat. The opposition leaders were taken on a guided tour of the facility where they saw and appreciated that the place was being used to sort IDs. Nothing more or less.
You should have seen how deflated their faces were looking afterwards. They looked like cartoons. They quietly left the place but to save face, they accused NRB of not being transparent. Surely, the opposition should have done better. Going forward, they should avoid playing into the hands of some political mercenaries whose only known agenda is to discredit NRB and MEC.
The Wednesday’s saga came at the back of several other similar unsubstantiated claims. One of them being the allegation that Smartmartic—the election technology that the Malawi Electoral Commission is using— is a rigging tool. Someone had been told that in the US, the voting company had allegedly been caught red-handed rigging elections. The opposition went as far as claiming that MEC, under its chairperson Justice Annabel Mtalimanja, had procured the machine to rig the votes for the Malawi Congress Party. Again, the opposition had not done their homework on the matter as it turned out that MEC procured Smartmatic several months before Justice Mtalimanja came on the scene.
On rigging claims, the opposition was challenged to bring evidence. Three months later, they have submitted nothing.
Another petty claim and demand the opposition have been making is that the MEC chairperson and the electoral body’s chief executive officer Andrew Mpesi should resign because of their alleged closeness to MCP or the party’s officials. Glad that sense has finally dawned on them and they seem to have given up on the issue. But the image they have created about themselves with such petty issues is that they are cry-babies up to nothing good.
But I know that within the opposition, there are so many smart guys who do not really subscribe to these petty issues that their vocal colleagues peddle day in and day out against MEC and its officials as well as NRB. My proposal to the leaders is that before they come to the public with madando of any kind or before they go to the press with anything, they should always try to do due diligence on the issues and synchronise them to show that they are all on the same page. But when they cry wolf with no iota of evidence to back up their assertions, they only end up with eggs smeared all over their faces. They were thoroughly embarrassed last Wednesday.
The opposition should always project themselves as a serious group on a mission to put things on a positive trajectory if they went into government. So far they have done and said nothing to put themselves above the ruling party. It has all been much ado about nothing.
