By [Ambuje Che] Tom Likambale

One of the most spectacular fallouts of the results of the May 19, 2009 elections in Malawi has been the spectre of knives being publicly out for the head of the opposition Malawi Congress Party [MCP] president, Rt. Honourable John Zenus Ungapake [JZU] Tembo.

The MCP is Malawi’s party of the independence struggle and has been the main opposition grouping in the legislature since the first multi-party government in 1994. For most of that time, Rt. Hon. JZU Tembo has been Leader of the Opposition in the House and has commanded considerable loyalty in the vintage party. Today, some are openly asking for his head.

In the just-ended legislative term, the MCP occupied 66 of the total 193 House seats. Following the polls, however, it has garnered its own record low of 26, representing a precipitous slide tempered only by the (even worse) showing of another once-mighty parliamentary bloc, the United Democratic Front, UDF, with 16 seats from a recent high-water mark of 49. In these elections it hasn’t rained for the opposition; it has poured.

Given this denouement one might be tempted to concur with the MCP’s erstwhile mouthpiece Ishmael Chafukira who, in its wake, publicly challenged the legitimacy of Hon JZU Tembo’s continued leadership of the party of Malawi’s founding president, Ngwazi Dr. Kamuzu Banda. However, one would be wrong.

Wrong, too, were the media pundits and civil society spokespeople who condemned the MCP for firing Chafukira from his position as party spokesperson, if not from the party altogether. The aforementioned faulted “a lack of democracy” in the MCP and an “intolerant” streak in Hon. JZU Tembo, for Chafukira’s woes. A herd mentality is typical of Malawi’s punditocracy, as is a critical glibness and ignorance when commenting on the internal processes of opposition parties.

Despite his earnest claims, Hon. Chafukira, a clearly intelligent and talented legislator, has not made a convincing case for bringing his disgruntlement with his party’s leadership to the public forum so soon after the election results; nor has he elucidated convincingly that the MCP’s loss was (singularly) the result of weakness in Hon JZU’s leadership.  And if the new MCP spokesperson Nancy Tembo is to be believed, Hon. Chafukira did not use any available internal mechanisms for grievance-airing and grievance-settling before going public. Chafukira thus directly violated the party’s well-known and long-standing “cornerstones” – or code of conduct - of Unity, Loyalty, Obedience and Discipline. To boot, he did so before waiting for the dust of the election loss to settle.

Opposition fortunes did not so much go down in flames on May 19^th for reasons of alleged weaknesses inherent in their ranks as Chafukira and and others would have us believe. Rather, they did so for things the government did which the opposition could not overcome.

Curiously, no pundits in Malawi’s media pantheon were able to describe the obviously devastating effect of the ruling DPP’s hegemony, to the total and illegal exclusion of the opposition and its points of view, of the publicly owned airwaves: two radio channels with the widest rural audience and the (almost) sole local television outlet. The more recent additional TV channel, the Catholic Church’s Luntha-TV, remains a fledgling and does not air political content. The other, independent Joy-TV, was killed at birth by the DPP government.

Nor could the pundits find time to gauge the effects of the DPP’s open use of vast government resources – from coerced civil servants to coerced school children to government vehicles and huge sums of public money – to fuel its campaign countrywide. Our pundits failed to even examine the effects on the campaign of the government’s tactic of intimidating its political opponents chiefly through police action and contrived court cases.

If the government did spectacularly well, winning the presidency and 114 seats before adding independents; while the opposition did spectacularly poorly, it was largely because of the aforementioned factors.

Contrary to popular media thinking, Hon. JZU’s longevity on Malawi’s political playground dating back to the days of independence is in fact an endearing quality; a strong point in his favour. Malawians do not generally consider stale men and women of accumulated experience in public service. These include the Aleke Bandas, the Cassim Chilumphas, the Justin Malewezis, the Joyce Bandas, the Bakili Muluzis, the Gwanda Chakuambas and others like them; a good number of whom, including Hon. JZU himself, have just been re-elected by their constituents.

Hon JZU, moreover, continues to enjoy the support of a demonstrable majority of his party’s rank and file. If nothing else, Hon. Tembo’s self-avowed “puludzu” persistence in fighting for political causes unfavourable to the ruling party, amid much resistance and hopeless odds, is exemplary and endearing. The argument that he is long past his political shelf life is thus less than convincing, to say the least.

In these days that are in the shadow of the May 19^th voting, Hon JZU Tembo should be left alone in his well-earned right to make up his own mind, in his own appropriate time, whether to resign or continue as leader of Malawi’s nationalist party following the recent election results.  It erodes not only Hon. JZU’s authority inside and outside the party, but also the party’s image, authority and effectiveness, when its leader is seen to be publicly hounded out of office by party apparatchiks so soon after the general elections. If Hon JZU’s long public service merits him certain courtesies, and it does, they must surely include his being treated with dignity and respect – certainly in public, and I would say in private, too.

The next general elections are five years away. Rt. Hon Tembo as a person, and the MCP as an institution, both have the accumulated wisdom and intellect to first let the dust settle before making decisions about leadership in tranquillity and appropriate subtlety to minimise further adverse vicissitudes to the party in light of the recent electoral losses.

Treat this leader with his well deserved dignity. Use internal party grievance-airing and grievance-settling mechanisms before going public; and, above all, observe the four cornerstones which have stood the test of time and served the party so well for so long.