Reading into UDF in-fights

I have this overwhelming temptation to cast more than just a cursory glance into the fight — or what passes for one — between the so-called supporters of two presidential aspirants of the United Democratic Front (UDF), musician Lucius Banda and the party’s acting chair, Friday Jumbe.

But my every attempt to read too much into it feels, for lack of a better term, impotent.

You see, that the two Sunday papers last week gave prominence to the match up at Chileka Airport should give one an idea of the enormity of the leadership problem in the party.

Somehow, though, I refuse to be drawn into the feeling that the incident yet proves the indispensability of its former chairman, former president Bakili Muluzi, under whose leadership such fights were unheard of, let alone be countenanced.

Some people hold this view that the fight just shows how much the party has become fractured since the ‘halcyon days’ of a united party (or perhaps, an illusion of one) under Muluzi.

It is a sign of failing fortunes for the party, some would say, but then nothing compares to the all time low set by the “party of death and darkness” (according to the late Chakufwa Chihana), Malawi Congress Party (MCP), when its more liberal minded members made the ingenious discovery that the best way to mend fences was through the panga.

At the height of its leadership problems, when party held conventions to elect the party leader so frequent that the current dearth of one seems very farcical, if not ironical, the MCP held some indaba at Motel Paradise in Blantyre where its members, having disagreed on who was a better leader between John Tembo and Gwanda Chakuamba, were literally at daggers drawn.

It is one of many unsavoury aspects of their history the MCP would like to forget in a hurry.

It is harsh, I know, to compare that piece of MCP’s political thuggery with what happened last Saturday at Chileka Airport where the party’s members went to welcome Muluzi from his medical trip abroad.

And it is for that reason I’m inclined to take the view that the incident at Chileka Airport was a no-brainer and you could say, tongue in cheek, it was some welcome action given that the party has been in doldrums for a while with the ruling Democratic Progressive Party hoggin the limelight.