Where is APM with all the mess in DPP?
Three weeks ago, I wrote here that everything considered, someone has to own the unending hullaballoo in the erstwhile governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). And that someone cannot be other than the party’s president Peter Mutharika (APM) himself who, in his own words, said he is the chief executive officer of the party and so no “one should feel more important than anyone”.
Whenever and wherever things go wrong in an entity, it is the man on top that is questioned. The question that is asked is: Why did the leadership not act to avert or sanitise the situation? Or why have things been allowed to degenerate to this level?
What we have seen and continue to see in the party is, therefore, because someone who is supposed to steer the party in the right direction and prevent it from falling into a dungeon is sleeping on their job. And it is when things are not happening as they should that rubble rousers emerge to stir up the dust in a whirlwind style.
My view is that the chaos we saw in Parliament this week has two sides. On one side is the fight for leadership in the party between the party’s president, APM, against the embattled Mulanje Central legislator Kondwani Nankhumwa. On the other side is the Malawi Congress Party making the most of the chaos in the DPP. MCP is fighting this battle in Parliament through the Speaker Catherine Gotani Hara who had all the paraphernalia to sanitise the situation over the issue of LoP.
At the centre of it all is the position of Leader of Opposition (LoP) currently still being held by Nankhumwa through an injunction he obtained several months ago. While DPP forgot to vacate it, for Nankhumwa it was a question of saying ‘let sleeping dogs lie’. Besides, it is the aggrieved party that moves the court to vacate an injunction.
But I did mention in my last entry that whether by a thin legal thread of an injunction or otherwise, Nakhumwa is standing on sinking sand. He has no substantive cause to be where he is because the injunction will sooner than later be vacated anyway. It, therefore, does not serve him any purpose to continue to cling to something which is just a bubble.
Nankhumnwa might appear to be a hero or legend that the whole DPP has been jumping up and down in the House to his tune this past week and in the process paralysing business of the House. But the long-term effect of his scheme is the irredeemable loss of political capital both within and outside Parliament. For whatever reason, Nankhumwa does not seem to smell the coffee. Or, it is taking him unnecessarily long to do so. He should have focused on the larger good for his political career. In this case, he should not have been fighting DPP or much less his replacement as LoP, Mary Thom Navicha. His fight with Navicha for LoP which resulted in the House degenerating into chaos will cost him more than what he will benefit by clinging to LoP.
The chaos at Parliament has not helped the DPP either. It was like the whole DPP fighting Nankhumwa, getting dirty in the process while the latter was obviously enjoying every moment of it. But the chickens will one day come home to roost.
But when all is said and done and the dust has settled, we need to look back and ask the important questions of why things got to this low in DPP. Who is the architect of all this? Who should have doen something to stop the nonsense? The one to own this is no other than the man on top, APM. During the three and a half years he has been out of power, he has miserably failed to run the party. He allowed some people to hijack it. He has been sleeping on the job. DPP as the main opposition party in Parliament which provides a LoP, has failed to perform the job of checking the excesses of the Executive arm of the government.
