No contact, no dialogue

To say Malawian politics is founded on surprises is to accord it a sublime compliment it barely deserves; the oft-predictable twists and turns of the local politics hardly come anywhere near there.

But once in a while, Malawian politics has had the feel of surprise written all over them which seem to inject fresh breath into an otherwise dour routine — like what the so-called taskforce for leadership change in Malawi Congress Party (MCP) has been doing in its ‘running battles’ with the party’s president, John Tembo.

The hapless taskforce is still singing the same, old tired refrain about, for lack of a more forceful term, the need for Tembo, to resign or “the wind of change in the party will change him”.

Heard that one before, haven’t we? And since the last time, nothing has changed, much to our chagrin, and more ruefully, to the taskforce’s.

And if the first time it was uttered it bore the sense of being an inspired thought, spare a tear for the taskforce this time around for it evokes no such emotion. It sounds like it is a sign of helplessness, of desperation, of a group attempting to be relevant by reminding everyone they are very much around, even if only just.

Winds of change was very much the symbol of multiparty democracy activists’ relentless assault on dictatorship and MCP’s own impotency and fallibility (circa 1992). For the taskforce to recycle that clarion call now is as flat as it is an embarrassment to the party itself given its heritage.

True, Tembo is politically well past his sell-by date and he needs to leave the stage but if you ask the Malawi Bureau of Standards (MBS), it is hard to deal with products whose shelf life is way gone.

According to MSB, the bureau’s inspectors have felt impotent, by a specific manner of speaking, in carrying out their duties of enforcing standards in shops by confiscating expired products when shop owners have threatened them with the fear of the unknown should they attempt to do so.

The inspectors turn to district commissioners for solutions, who summon chiefs to tell their subjects to remove the threats of the unknown.

I’m not suggesting by any stretch that Tembo has anything to threaten them with, but by and by, the taskforce’s initiative, inspired as it was in the beginning, is becoming to look more like a fight of wimpy children who can only attack their enemies from the safety of distance and retreating at the earliest hint of trouble, even if that is only a gust of wind.

And to think this is the party of the Ngwazi (and I mean the original Ngwazi here) who revered in the twin principles of contact and dialogue! He surely must be turning in his grave at the anarchy in the party that once was the beacon of unity and loyalty, even if much of it was cosmetic.

But for goodness’ sake, let the media be not your battleground, not even your avenue for contact and dialogue. The media, for all purposes and intents, has never been a reliable mphala for settling a crisis; in the wrong hands, it’s one for settling old scores.

The media will feed on the leadership wrangle until the party strangulates itself to a slow, painful death and after that, there be will ironical rebukes of the media’s culpability in the demise of the longest serving party, while others will be self-congratulating for a job well-done in bringing a once mighty institution to shameful end. Silly!