Opposition has never been strong

Abele Kayembe, the ‘leader of opposition’ in Parliament, is an unhappy man — and hapless to boot. His party president, John Tembo, refuses to defer to him; some sections of the opposition he is supposed to lead won’t even refer to him by his ‘rightful’ title or even by name for that matter.

He should have been a happy man, however. It is not everyday that a leader of opposition enjoys the patronage of the party in power and African politics being what they are, bedfellows of ruling parties never want for anything, no, not even a piece of mind, so why should he have lost his in the first place?

However, unease hangs around him and within the last week, he came to the ‘shocking’ conclusion that the opposition in the country is a lame duck; so weak so much so that unless donors come in to the opposition’s aid, it would collapse on the very threshold of democracy on which it was supposed to flourish.

Somehow, I can’t help having this feeling that he is a slow learner; it has taken ages to realise the opposition in the country is weak. No, sir, the opposition didn’t become weak last week, or even a week before that.

The opposition has been a weak institution for quite a long time, since 1994 for that matter when we had it oscillating between reason in one moment and utter tomfoolery the next. Some will point to 2004-2009 as the pinnacle of a strong opposition. Well, it depends on how you look at it.

An opposition that would heckle President Bingu wa Mutharika in one moment, push him to the corner, but scuttle into the safety of darkness when threatened in one way or the other by state machinery or some loudmouths personified in the civil society and the media hardly accounts for a definition of a strong opposition.

But a new low in the politics of opposition came last year and the irony of it all is that Kayembe participated in and was (and still is) a beneficiary of a sham democratic procedure in which government was given the latitude to choose its own opponent.

And that was brought about because a part of the opposition, in a moment of sheer carelessness, had gored itself to death and the other part had sold out — including Kayembe himself — to the so-called mature principles of mature democracy when it cast it lots with a people already possessing power of immeasurable magnitude. And whatever way you look at it, you don’t need a donor to rectify that.

That said, however, the youthful if hopeless ‘leader of opposition’ had a point when he said the civil society and the media have been compromised and they have largely abandoned the post of watchdogs.

Whenever some sections of the civil society (and I mean those that are still alive) have attempted to point one or two ills in government, the response hasn’t been as romantic. They have been vilified with the type of rhetoric that tramples on the very principles of democracy on which the government purportedly operates.

The media? Well, that is another cup of tea altogether. And, yeah, one way or the other, the authorities have done all they can to emasculate the media using some tried and tested means ... but, perhaps, if you get the hint, that’s a discussion for another day, in another environment when the media shall have been removed from the blacklist of complicit bodies against democracy, er, government.