I will not begin to pontificate here and blame President Joyce Banda and her PP for taking full advantage of the K61 billion scandal to squeeze from it as much political capital as possible.
By its very nature, that is politics and it is only right that DPP should take responsibility and bear the full brunt.
Nicholas Dausi and his DPP should, therefore, be ashamed to even imagine in their wildest dreams that threats and intimidation of petty lawsuits against the media and those associated with revealing the billions that Bingu amassed using poor Malawians’ name will cower anybody into submission.
Intimidation will not stop the President from taking advantage of the scandal and warn Malawians, as she did in the North, against voting for DPP during next year’s elections for fear the party will screw them again if given power exactly the same way its founding president did.
Indeed, intimidation did not stop Uladi Mussa from telling a rally that Joyce Banda is the only real deal and not followers of her two immediate predecessors in DPP and UDF whose legacies are tainted with accusations of misappropriating billions of kwacha from poor Malawians groaning under the most debilitating yoke of poverty.
Yet, I submit that all this deafening cacophony of blame rightfully being shoved down the throat of DPP and the late Mutharika should not blind us to what is happening today.
And what is happening today is very simple: President Banda, too, is showing signs of unexplained wealth since she ascended to the high office and here is why: she is also splashing billions.
Credit to her, the One Cow, One Family Initiative–I hope I am quoting correctly, there are just too many initiatives, others just political decoys, for one to take track of it all—will certainly empower somebody somewhere and perhaps drive them out of the poverty band one sunny day.
But this is a massive project that requires massive injection of billions and yet the President has made it clear, it is her un-holed pocket that is funding it and it has got nothing to do with Treasury or the largesse of some benevolent donors. Question is where has she got the billions from?
This is not all. There are several other multi-billion initiatives whose funding the President has been keen to insist will come from her own money.
Only last week, young men and women across the country woke up to the announcement of a K100 million inter-constituency sports trophy to be bankrolled by the President.
And then there is the mother of them all—a parallel fertiliser subsidy that goes into hundreds of billions also to come from the full and able pocket of the President.
Clearly, this is all done in the spirit of the campaign for the State House, but again, that question, where does she get all this money because, let us face it, her salary, which we all know, is out of question.
PP apologists would be quick to say she sources it from well-wishers and my response would be: Who are these well-wishers and why are they giving such colossal sums of money that can even fund a parallel government subsidy programme that has traditional donors that pour money into it? Shouldn’t Malawians know them or, better still, shouldn’t there be a law that allows Malawians to know such shenanigans?
Yet, is this not exactly what JB’s predecessors were doing? They were also splashing money anyhow as she is doing today and Malawians do not have an idea where it is coming from.
I will finish with what I wrote a couple of weeks ago that unless we, Malawians, rise up and demand accountability through passing of laws that empower us to check the wealth of our leaders, accumulating wealth at our expense will be a vicious cycle.
I am not saying the President is corrupt or prone to fraud. All I am saying is that she is clearly exhibiting signs of being a billionaire like her two predecessors and it does not smell good.
