PRESS STATEMENT IN THE MATTER OF HON. DR LAZARUS CHAKWERA’S PRESS CLAIMS INTRODUCTION Addressing the press last Monday, on 8th December 2014, the Leader of the Opposition, Honourable Lazarus Chakwera, chose to take upon himself the task of amplifying the thoughtless assertion that insists that the State President, His Excellency Professor Arthur Peter Mutharika, and his administration do not care about the tragedy of human suffering that the economic challenges besetting the country have visited upon the people of Malawi. Like a Pharisee of now, Hon. Reverend Chakwera, would obviously have loved to see - as we have been instructed by his manner of effort, tone and mood - President Mutharika and his administration wear sack cloths and flagellate themselves to demonstrate that they care. Lest the leader of the opposition continues to find comfort in self- delusion, the President wishes to assure him that he knows the suffering of the people of Malawi and, therefore, he will not be persuaded to attend to the pointless need of resorting to grand theatrical gestures or actions or pronouncements. The people of Malawi want action, not speeches. The State President knows as a matter of fact that the overwhelming majority of the masses of Malawians would be gravely offended if, today, to respond to the demands of the Pharisees of our times, he should take to the stage to weep tears meant for the camera, to convince them he, at last, understands their pain, and is with them in lamenting their individual tragedies. Let Honourable Chakwera be told that, as far as President Mutharika and his government are concerned, there will be no empty theatrical gestures or actions or pronouncements, no prancing on the stage and no flagellation, but we will simply continue to act against the suffering of our people, as decisively as we have sought and resolved to, without being seduced to do otherwise by holier than thou sentiments of those that are obsessed with the desperation of seeking cheap political capital from the sanctuaries where the untried and the untested hide, who because they are in the safety of not being in office, and who by possessing the advantage of not being on the stage of public scrutiny, pretend to be present day Messiahs with all the answers. The president knows that the leader of the opposition is an eloquent spectator who loves to speak from the exaggerated comfort of knowledge and saintly pretence. His usual disposition is one of those who will stride down the sidewalk as we march along the long and difficult highway to the better life to which we are committed, forever mocking, forever throwing our inevitable temporary challenges at our faces, forever triumphant when we seem to falter, forever finding fault even with the way we walk, always predicting that nothing but despair will be our reward whenever we come to the end of our long journey. The leader of the opposition, like many politicians and critics need to throw off the cloak of self-imposed superiority that seeks to pretend that simply for being on the other side they possess the exclusive rights to the privilege of knowing it all. As government, we will always refuse to accept the cloak of imposed inferiority that seeks to have us define ourselves as unequal to deep challenges that the country is facing. STATE OF AFFAIRS Given our real challenges, none among us should allow ourselves to be seduced by the false promise of delusion. To return to our real world, the Hon Chakwera will have to remember that the matters he raised, with the intention to condemn President Mutharika to burn forever in an inferno of feeling bad, are matters he has raised on many occasions, to challenge our nation to act in unity to eradicate the deeply entrenched legacies of the past, as well as respond to negative tendencies born of the opportunities provided by the democratic order. We trust that one day, the Hon Chakwera, will see the need to explain to the nation why he had to say, in this regard, things that bear no furthest coincidence with the truth, because it could not just have resulted from careless misuse of words. The Hon. Chakwera knows that at the time President Mutharika came into office some six months ago, the economy was already rolling down the cliff. Inflation and interest rates were already in a stiff competition as if there was a promised reward for one who would climb higher than the other. The social sectors were hemorrhaging at rates that were not only alarming but unprecedented. The development partners decided to suspend their participation in direct budgetary financing by reason of Cash gate. The President inherited a country that was almost on a life support, and instead of dwelling on finger pointing, took responsibility to act decisively in meeting the challenges. To clog the hemorrhage of already scarce public resources, he started by sizing down the Cabinet, stopped the craze of everyday Presidential travel, made sure that the age-old euphoria of public servants being present at every presidential or public function got restricted to only those to whom the event was relevant, and constituted the Public Service Reform Commission to provide strategic leadership in the implementation of Public Service Reforms in a bid to improve service delivery in Malawi. If the leader of the opposition cannot see that these actions were taken at the instructions of the President’s own knowledge of people’s suffering and the desire to do everything possible to make sure answers are found to their problems, it confirms the public worry that the opposition is teetering under the weight of leadership bankruptcy, the kind that may be out to set new records about its lack of substance. The president has engaged every development partner inside Malawi and on foreign soils. He has done all there is to do. He has left the criminal justice system alone to deal with the Cashgate cases. He has beefed up the capacities of oversight and accountability institution by appointing new leadership and increasing budgetary allocations to them. More resources have been made available to upgrade and tighten the financial management systems. At the same time, resources have been identified to conduct further audit in the civil service exercise dating back to 2005. If these efforts by the President are nothing more than an exponent of naivety on his part, what would the leader of the opposition have done differently? The need for Malawians to have decent living and for public workers to earn a bit more than what they get at present goes without any need of saying. When our workers demand more perks, they are not crazy; their cries are justified because the cost of living has gone up, while their disposable incomes have stagnated. What Hon. Lazarus Chakwera must be doing is not to abdicate the leadership responsibility expected of him to be an advocate of the truth, and, instead, become cheer leader of bad news. Because if he were honest, as is expected of a man of God, he should be joining hands with Government in explaining to the public that decent pay can only be met by the availability of resources. At the present circumstances, the resources are overstretched; they will have to be shared. It is the expected responsibility of all elected leaders to be friends of the truth, even if doing so would offend their crave for cheap popularity. SALARY INCREMENTS Before he fingers at what he feels are leadership problems in other quarters, the leader of the opposition is better advised to take control of the many loose ends in how he manages his party so that it is not all over the map on so many issues of national importance. For instance, the leader of the opposition should be concerned that the party that he leads has taken conflicting positions on the issue of salary increments. While the Hon Chakwera wants to have the world believe that salary increments to elected officials is tantamount to blue murder, the person elected to speak on behalf of the Malawi Congress Party, Hon Dr. Jessie Kabwila, celebrated the news and went the whole hog of justifying the salary review. We will remain alert to see what Hon. Chakwera will do to Hon. Kabwila for presenting a position of the party which is different from him. The Minister of Finance, Goodall Gondwe, could not have put it any better that nothing could be further from the truth than to claim that the motive for reviewing the salaries of elected officials was sinister. No poetic orchestra of words from the leader of the opposition will make the motive sinister. The flowery words will only help to embellish the presentation but will do nothing to add any substance to the falsehoods that the leader of the opposition is ready to appear under his seal as long as they serve his immediate purposes of looking saintly. All the increments are according to the budget. The leader of the opposition may wish to straighten his relationship with the experienced MPs of his party, whom he dislikes, to help him understand how to read budget documents. Sinister projects are never documented to the extent of being in a budget document. The figures he attacked and blamed the State President for were approved by him when he voted for the budget on the floor of the House. Government will not accept that the leader of the opposition should blame his ignorance on parliamentary matters on the President. Leave that alone, the President stated his position that he will not take his revised salary until the economy improves. The vice president too took the same position. If the leader of the opposition is capable of changing his positions because of pressure (as shown by his contradictions with the spokesperson of his party), President Mutharika does not possess those capabilities. The leader of the opposition may wish to check with Treasury if the President ever took his revised salary to accuse him of changing stance because of pressure. It is nonsensical for the leader of the opposition to claim that the increments were deliberately leaked to divert people’s attention from the challenges that the country is facing because these are not new. ETHICAL LEADERSHIP The leader of opposition’s penchant for qualifying the leadership of others with derogatory adjectives is quite remarkable. One wonders whether paying K5, 000 journalists to cover his press conference was part of his ethical leadership. If giving money to journalists is not ethical leadership as his statement says, what does he call his own gesture to journalists and what does it say about his leadership. CONCLUSION The President knows that the government he has the honour to lead and the people who lined up to vote, regardless of whether they voted for him or not, are inspired by a common vision of creating a people-centred society. Accordingly, therefore, the purpose that will drive this President and his government shall be the enlargement of the circle of human fulfillment and the continuous expansion of the borders of self-actualization of the people. We must all agree that determinant of the legitimacy of the programmes we have outlined; the institutions that we must continue to create; the legislation that must be enacted to support the policies must be whether they serve these objectives. We challenge Hon. Chakwera to use his position to respond to the President with a cross-party approach which creates a new spirit of national unity in dealing with these challenges. Let us consider the need to join hands to provide our contribution in our respective roles by placing the interest of the country above that of our own parties or politics in general. We can do this once we begin to see eye to eye and establish common ground on the basis of our common patriotism. Because if we fail to know one another, it will always be impossible to develop a common vocabulary. And without that common vocabulary, we will find it very difficult to find one another on the matters on which we disagree. Consequently, it will be difficult to enter into the national partnership that we badly need in order to engage in a determined drive to liberate our people from the prisons of depravity and expand their frontiers of opportunity. KONDWANI NANKHUMWA, MP MINISTER OF INFORMATION, TOURISM & CULTURE GOVERNMENT SPOKERPERSON 09th DECEMBER 2014
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 15:54:06 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015