Slave-like support is unproductive
What is stated in the above heading is what has been happening in Malawi for the past five years. The result has been a failed government.
The number of supporters for a politic party is very important during elections more especially if the majority of them have registered to vote. It must be noted that some people have a habit of showing up at meetings of every party. Such people give false hopes about the real political supporters for a particular party. The problem here is that in Malawi party members are not registered as such.
In Malawi experience has, so far, shown that a political party which gets into government has a retrogressive belief that it is their time to eat. This defeats the expectations of having a government which is ready to serve all Malawians. The mind set of saying it is our time to eat has been the genesis of corruption and other malpractices in government. Furthermore, the same mind set has made the support to the State President not genuine and sometimes misleading. Instead of being advisers, the supporters have shown slave mentality whereby they shout oh yes, oh yes and clap hands for everything and anything that the leader says. Having realised that this makes no sense, Vice President Chilima who is also the leader of the United Transformation Movement (UTM) once advised his supporters not to clap for everything without thinking.
At the moment some of the staunch supporters of the DPP led government are the DPP cadets. Unfortunately, these supporters have created a lot of fear in the country of late media reports have come up with stories of severe attacks and torture of innocent people and it is alleged to have been done by the cadets. Women have come out to demonstrate and show their displeasure about their militant behaviour of cadets. Surprisingly the cadets are also known as Ana Adadie, probably meaning they are the President’s children. With all due respect how do the supporters of the President, including Cabinet ministers accept such an arrangement of presidential militias in a democratic country? If the opposition parties can each organise its own militias, what can happen to the peace in this country?
In fact Malawi is failing to develop because of lack of proper advice to the Head of State. Cabinet ministers should always be ready with advice while realising that the President too can make mistakes. Unfortunately what is seen is that Cabinet ministers are busy protecting their positions while perfecting the notion that it is their time to eat. Therefore they seem to rather prefer to sheepishly say yes, yes to the President than being seen to step on his feet.
The other problem in this country is that people support the party because of the home-boy syndrome and not that it has anything special to offer. To make it worse parties are not identifiable by their ideals and it is wrong to think that party manifestos can identify a party. In fact, manifestos seem to say about similar things. It is also wrong to think that party symbols are ideals. Having no ideals is what has made DPP government to fail because it had no target to follow.
Meanwhile, it cannot be overemphasized that having a cabinet which will put the President on his feet can be a formula for a successful government. Therefore, it goes without saying, that current presidential candidates should start looking at the would be cabinet for success. It cannot be said enough that Malawians do not want another failed government because they has suffered enough.
