An Interview with Muluzi

When the Chief Reporter for Malawi News opened the media door for Muluzi to give a “Special Interview” on 3 January 2009, Muluzi was clear that his ambition to stand again has everything to with himself and his party and little to do with Malawi as a country.

“We had as a party taken a move for transition for Dr. Mutharika and I was not in the equation for coming back. I would like this very clear. It was only when Dr. Mutharika left the UDF and even went further to form his own party. That threatened my party,” says Muluzi.

The worst fear is confirmed. It is all about bitterness, revenge and a war to save the face of the wounded party. This is what Malawi’s critical voices have said all along. I remember the University of Malawi Bright Molande’s “Candle Burning in the Storm” insisting on revenge and bitterness as the real motives and cause of Muluzi’s political behaviour, that the rest are mere excuses and propaganda springboards.

What is more to it? Muluzi has also awoken to the fact that his bulldozing style of leadership has consistently killed the party. He has lost the legacy and he feels he cannot retire from politics in that mess.

“There is no way I am going to leave the UDF now in such a state of affairs. Let me be here. I went to the people and said UDF vote for this man. Do you think people will trust me again? … For me to say I will give you another person again. No.”

One reads in the interview the deep fear retiring without honour, without legacy, the fear of descending into political oblivion. His last dream in the equation of coming back is to project the last image of leadership before his party. It is the loss of trust of his followers that eats Muluzi up, inwardly. It is the man’s inward war of the soul to restore lost trust that completes his equation of coming back. In the way Muluzi speaks, it is first all about himself, and second his party, and nothing really to do taking Malawi anywhere forward.

Here, Muluzi speaks with a patronizing attitude when he speaks giving his party a leader as though the party has not matured to the democracy of collectively deciding its own leadership. One may find this attitude an insult to many intelligent members of the party and those who trully love democratic principles within.

Elsewhere, Muluzi is a desperate man who will do anything to exact his vengeance upon Bingu wa Mutharika. That is why he is entering a political alliance with MCP. This political marriage of convenience is already fiercely opposed within MCP ranks. That is why John Tembo is staging the political downfall of Speaker Louis Chimango and Bester Majoni who are opposed to the alliance. Muluzi is bent on using MCP in his ambition to surmount Malawi again.

Malawians remember as well that before what Muluzi calls “the equation of coming back”, first he had to fail in the equation of staying on in power. The constitutional and goodwill of the people prevailed upon him. Even as Head of State then, Muluzi knew well that he could only rule more only if the Constitution changed.

So, the seed of the ambition to keep on ruling Malawi was planted elsewhere before. Its black flower hanging on Muluzi’s image of a new democrat still eclipses Malawi’s history of democracy. Muluzi should know history.

He offers credit to Kamuzu Banda for bringing independence in 1964. But that history lesson slightly misses the heartbeat of truth. He says “we needed to move a little bit forward…because the world was changing particularly Southern Africa.” No. We needed change because we were suffering under dictatorship.

This time Muluzi claims he wants to change things. But the Law, the donor community, the mood, the numbers and probably the Divine will are all against his desires. Muslims have been petitioning and praying against Muluzi’s coming back lately. They have discovered what he is. “In 1994, people had no time to scrutinise him. They simply wanted change. Even a chicken could have ruled them,” says Al Haj Alick Likonde, chairman of the Quadria Muslims who suffered untold misery under Muluzi’s rule.

Then Muluzi is honest enough to accept that after independence and democracy, “we needed economic transformation, economic development … [because] people don’t eat these things.” Implicitly, he publicly accepts that his rule badly needed economic transformation.

Otherwise, Muluzi political theory that a period of democratic consolidation cannot happen together with economic development is false and non-existent. Or else, who is to tell us the book, chapter and verse for this miscarried political theory? If this political theory is valid, why is it that Muluzi’s first five years registered a positive economic trend just when we were mounting the structures of democracy?

Will Muluzi prevail against the Law, the donor community, the mood, the numbers and the Divine will?