Not those DPP ministers again

APRIL 15, 2012

I perfectly get it why President Joyce Banda would want to toy with the idea of forming a government of national unity (GNU) as she comes up with a new Cabinet in the coming days. She does not desire unnecessary clogs in the wheels of her government’s legislative agenda machinery in Parliament.

It also shows the President’s forgiving demeanour, an attempt to walk the talk that there would be no room for vengeance in her administration.

Otherwise, how else would one attempt to explain Joyce Banda’s posture to even begin to imagine that she can work with the same group of people who took it as a hobby to constantly castigate and rubbish her at every other opportunity available before Bingu wa Mutharika died, merely for the fact that she showed ambition to compete against the DPP’s anointed one, Peter Mutharika.

But the new President must also learn to live with the fact that Cabinet appointments are not only her personal business. It is rather a national undertaking. I, therefore, beseech her to avoid appointing into her new Cabinet the same faces that were in the late Mutharika’s government. That lot should rot in a political purgatory and pay the full penalty for the misery they inflicted on innocent Malawians.

If Joyce Banda insists on this GNU thing, then ministers from DPP must only be those MPs not tainted by the excesses of the fallen government and were not ministers before. The President must avoid taking us back to Babylon.

This is for the mere reason that the country is simply tired of the old faces because they were wolves in sheep’s skin who celebrated and clapped hands when Malawians were languishing in the hell that the late Mutharika created out of Malawi.

All I am saying is Joyce Banda can form her cherished and favourite GNU and put into Cabinet whomsoever she wants but it will be insincerity of the greatest magnitude if she decides in her wisdom to include anybody from that Mutharika Cabinet. Why should she pick the same group that failed and caused sorrow to Malawians for four long years when she can pick new faces from a sample of 13 million of us?

Granted, Malawians chose the late Bingu wa Mutharika to be President in 2009 and it is at him where the buck ultimately stopped. It is only him that ultimately bore the responsibility for the things that went terribly wrong in this country.

But his Cabinet ministers were paid top dollar to precisely advise the late President when things were going wrong in this country. They were given those Landcruiser VX Prados to visit the remotest corners of this country to see for themselves how people are languishing as a result of the failed policies that the late Mutharika tragically pursued in the past four years.

They did not. Instead, they snored on duty and clapped hands when almost everybody said the zero-deficit budget, for example, was hopelessly faulty especially when all the financial blue print brought were a windfall of both personal and corporate taxes on the heads of Malawians.

The DPP ministers did not give a damn when people were losing jobs as a result of a shrinking industry due to the heavy taxes and shortages of forex and fuel.

In fact, some ministries such as Labour were concocting press releases, lying to Malawians through false figures of job losses just to paint a bright picture and look good and smell like a rose to the late President.

To cut a long tale short, the DPP ministers were not for the people of Malawi but were bent on serving a political master who was completely off rails to fill up their bellies while the rest of us were languishing with hopelessness.

The President must know that such people have no room at her table if she is going to achieve her aim of bringing back hope and belief to Malawians, thereby saving the country from near collapse.

Please, Madam President, avoid ministers who were serving the DPP regime like a bad bout of plague. They were bad news for Malawi. They will be bad news for you. They should be nowhere near power. They have shown that they would use it only for their bellies and not for national good.