Muntharika on Calista, Chilima, Masangwi, Kaliati, UTM & women

By 

Manoawiri Chitsamba

Last weekend while coming from the Ngoni cultural festival in Mzuzu, Professor Peter Mutharika of DPP who is also a current president of Malawi, addressed a rally of scores of people in the Northern region on a number of things, but what was of material were the pronunciations he made on the newly formed party of predominantly DPP rebels, called the UTM. 

In his speech filled with anger, vitriol and vituperations, Muntharika did warn Dr Chilima, Kaliati, Masangwi, Calista, and the entire UTM that they must stop castigating and insulting him and leaders of DPP  at their rallies because if they continue he will use the constitution to prosecute them and did not rule out further actions. In his own words he repeated what is now well known threat that he would “crush them as a ton of bricks” to ensure they get obliterated completely. A ton of bricks falling on the four people in subject would crush them completely, as you can imagine.  He then went further to describe how evil of a woman Calista was and gave examples of how she ill-treated his brother her deceased husband, how she run away with booty belonging to his deceased brother’s estate and gave it to her friends in Area 10 for safe keeping, and how she never wanted to come to witness the last moments of her late husband Bingu. 

In the course of these pronunciations, Peter Mutharika also revealed to the nation how his brother Bingu regretted marrying Calista and also how he regretted choosing Joyce Banda as a running-mate for him in 2009. 

The issue herein however is whether Peter was wrong or right in these pronunciations by looking at the general principles that have governed political manoeuvre so far in Malawi and in some way, in relation to the yardstick of fundamental rights.

Where Peter was wrong was on insulting Calista and Joyce Banda. First of all, Joyce Banda is not part of UTM and even if she was too foolish, one does not see how she would want to join UTM whose chances of a win are very slim. If Joyce Banda’s interest would be to ensure she escapes these ruling party blackmails for good, even a commoner would see where she would need to pile her support- It definitely cannot be UTM. In this case it was wrong for APM to bring in Joyce Banda in the fight as it would have been possible for him to finish off the fight against UTM founders without opening a new battle front unnecessarily.  Even of APM was to go back to JB to apologize, it would less savvy for JB to believe that and render her support to DPP, just as it would be less savvy for her to support a party that won’t win anyway! She made that mistake in 2014, and she realized only when she called for a re-run. One does not expect her to repeat that mistake.

Peter Mutharika was also wrong on Calista. Of course from the face of it,  Calista and her fellow UTM founders have really insulted the president almost every time they have had a meeting. However, as a president he needed not pay them back with such argumentum ad hominem . He is a president and lawyer, he should have known better. By doing exactly that which a reasonable person of his calibre in his position would have foreseen as potentially denigrating on women, and would have hence avoided doing it, APM behaved as an unreasonable man. Going forward he must not do this, instead he must attack Calistas accusations, policies, and pronunciations on merit.

On the other hand, we would argue that Mutharika was not wrong to answer back at the insults he has received thus far from UTM founders. In fact if truth be told, he did less. He was supposed to not only threaten them, he was also supposed to fight them on the allegation that Peter is corrupt. He must have outlined either how he is not corrupt, or how, if possible, UTM being a breakaway group of DPP, probably suffers the same ills that it purports to impute on him and DP aloneP. He was supposed to repeat what he has been saying previously about how unclean each of the four is just as he once narrated about Masangwi, Calista, Kaliati etc regarding some demands for millions of kwacha they laid before the DPP just before they were ejected from the party. If the president cannot repeat these and more, but instead simply choses to resort to crushing them with a ton of bricks, many will not believe his version of the story but will believe that perhaps UTM have a point! So, next time the APM must do more to show us how hypocritical UTM founders are, or how much they are liars. The bricks threat doesn’t cut it, although it will be interesting to see how the Mangochi rally will be organized given that UTM may tone down on insults.

In sum, it should be said that APM was wrong to castigate women, and was right to answer the UTM on their insults and going forward he must compose well-crafted lines of argument along the following themes of Corruption, nepotism, job creation. He must tell us how he is better than the UTM has described him to be and/or he must pronounce what we don’t know about UTM in order to cast doubts in our minds too in respect of the ability of UTM to be better than DPP!

Cheers

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