Saturday, November 22, 2008

Malawi: Sitting President versus Former President

Of late, there has been a trade of barbs between Malawi's sitting President Bingu wa Mutharika and his predecessor, Bakili Muluzi. The two wrote each other trading accusations on a wide range of issues. I looked for the letters and today I present one from Muluzi, apparently a response to Mutharika's piece. I haven't got Mutharika's letter to Muluzi yet, but I will present it the moment I lay my hands on it.

Enjoy reading this one.


Muluzi's reply to Mutharika: Malawi Presidential paranoia

31st October 2008

His Excellency Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika
President of the Republic of Malawi
New State House
LILONGWE

Your Excellency,

RE: CRIMINAL LIBEL AND SEDITION-RESPONSE

Please kindly accept my personal greetings and best wishes and those of the former First Lady, and we trust that you are keeping well.

Your Excellency, I am compelled to respond to your letter dated 28th October, 2008, because it contains serious allegations against me personally, Messrs. Humphrey Mvula, Patrick Mbewe, Harry Thomson and Brown Mpinganjira, MP, among others. I note that this letter is a repeat of allegations contained in your letters to me dated 14th July, 2006 and 12th March, 2008.

Your Excellency, I will commence my response by refuting in the strongest terms your assertions in paragraph two where you accuse me of being confrontational and attempting to remove you from the Presidency.

Your Excellency, this is entirely false as you are fully aware that I, Bakili Muluzi, worked tirelessly to secure your Presidency and after the elections in 2004, I went further in assisting you to form a workable government by talking to the leadership of opposition parties, and independent Members of Parliament. This is clear testimony of my personal goodwill and support for your government.

Your Excellency, I would also wish to remind you that I have personally invested a lot energy and effort in the quest of finding a solution to the political impasse engulfing this country today. Your Excellency, under my guidance, members of the United Democratic Front (UDF) have remained calm even after you decided to dump the party that sponsored you to the Presidency in February 2005.

Your letter gives me the impression that there must be something seriously wrong with or in the manner that authentic and credible intelligence information is submitted to Your Excellency as the Head of State and Government.

The allegations raised in your letter are not only false but concocted lies fabricated for ulterior political motives by dubious individuals within the intelligence or your political system.

Your Excellency, upon assuming office in May 2004, I did advise you to exercise extreme caution in the handling of intelligence information that will be passed on to you.

I gave you numerous examples of how late Dr. Kamuzu Banda, the first President of the Republic, was held virtually hostage by intelligence officers and political functionaries who routinely fed him with false information resulting in the Ngwazi making wrong decisions and creating imagined enemies.

Your Excellency, I am always amazed when you attribute to my name all the negative publicity against you even when some of such is borne from unpopular government decisions or where the citizens agitate for a cause that seem to run contra to your own way of looking at issues.

Your Excellency, both of us are aware that democracy is government by the consent of the governed who must approve not only the rules by which they are administered but also the policies affecting them.

Your Excellency, I think time has come when all of us should remember that democracy does not demand blind obedience, unquestioning discipline and acceptance of the status quo; but calls upon leaders to appreciate people’s right to understand and take active participation in matters affecting them.

I am equally amazed and humbled when you assert that I control the media, particularly the on-line publication called Nyasa Times and the independent media in general.

Your Excellency, these allegations are false and I would advise you to stop peddling such allegations because they have the capacity to undermine the credibility of your High Office.

Your Excellency, I have also found it disheartening that you have personally and through your ministers attributed all your failures to me and my colleagues in the UDF. Some of the failures have been occasioned by natural causes and others by accidents that very little could have been done to prevent them from happening.
I think and believe that leadership demands of us objectivity, honesty, transparency and accountability. During my reign, a lot was achieved and several programmes were work-in-progress by the time you took over government and I would therefore expect you to publicly acknowledge such contributions.

Your Excellency, I would like to correct your assumption that Mr. Humphrey Mvula resides in my house and that he has been employed or deployed to write and publish articles that are critical to Your Excellency.

Your Excellency, Mr. Humphrey Mvula has never lived with me in my house and he has never been my employee nor has he been hired to write negative articles about Your Excellency. This is again a case of inaccurate and misleading intelligence information.

Your Excellency may recall that Mr. Humphrey Mvula was one of the few individuals who worked tirelessly during our successful campaign for your Presidency. Unfortunately, like me, Mr. Humphrey Mvula has been a victim of your administration’s witch-hunt tactics having been arrested eleven (11) times in the last four years.

Your Excellency, it is most unfortunate and illogical that the alleged ‘ghosts’ story by Raphael Tenthani and Mabvuto Banda could also be attributed to me personally when it is on record that the story had Reverend Malani Mtonga, your Special Assistant on Religious Affairs, as the source. How does it become a Muluzi fabrication and where does Muluzi fit in this equation?

Your Excellency, the two journalists are employed by international news organizations and have also written very positive stories about Your Excellency and very negative stories about myself.

The allegations that Nyasanet and Nyasa Times are funded by me personally are inaccurate and false. Whilst I cannot answer for Mr. Humphrey Mvula about his alleged involvement, I, however, have my doubts and do not subscribe to the philosophy that he is the Nyasanet/Nyasa Times mastermind.

Your Excellency, such allegations against individuals demand that hard evidence should be available, otherwise you may be targeting wrong people for victimization as you hunt around for real enemies.

Your Excellency, the matter about drunkenness as published in The Dispatch newspaper has no bearing on me personally, and on any of the persons that you accuse.

Your Excellency, you would do me great favour if you sued The Dispatch newspaper instead of attributing it to me or persons believed to be closely connected to me. I cannot bear witness as to whether you take or you do not take alcohol because that is a very personal matter.

Your Excellency, the issues about teargas from Malawi to Zimbabwe and clearance of Chinese arms for Zimbabwe were known to me following media reports. Personally, I did not take keen interest in the two allegations and I viewed them with a lot of skepticism based on my experience of the past.

Your Excellency, the allegations alluding to the COMESA Report are equally strange to me because I have not seen the report in the recent years.

Your Excellency should, however, be appraised that the COMESA Report was brought to the fore during the campaign in 2004 by M’mgwirizano Coalition through The Nation and the defunct Chronicle newspapers. We all worked very hard to diffuse its impact on your candidature then. Fortunately, we succeeded and it did not hamper our quest for you to be elected President.

Your Excellency, the COMESA fiasco should at no time be attributed to me personally or anyone in my political party, the United Democratic Front (UDF) because I did my very best to defend you from a unanimous decision to dismiss you and later report you to police. The minutes of that special COMESA summit would bear witness.

Your Excellency, it is not true that the report was authored with the assistance of a committee comprising Messrs. Harry Thomson, Patrick Mbewe, Brown Mpinganjira, late Dumbo Lemani, late Edward Bwanali and late Chakakala Chaziya.

Your Excellency, from my recollection, the COMESA Report was authored by a special committee of five (5) eminent persons and none of them was Malawian.
Your Excellency, history will judge us as great leaders if we accept that there was once a past, which was checkered with successes and failures rather than exist in the self-belief of omnipotence and infallibility. In this regard, whether COMESA was a smooth ride or not, it is a matter of inclination and subjective debate.

Your Excellency, I would advise you to discard the feeling that it was the UDF that hatched a plan to have you removed as COMESA Secretary General.

I would also advise you to desist from repeatedly referring to the COMESA Report because its contents cannot be changed and there are also other salient features that some of us would rather not talk about; for example, the state of your nationality at that time.

Your Excellency, if it were to be true that indeed out of my hatred for you I had formed a committee to remove you from COMESA, does it make sense, Your Excellency, that the same Muluzi decided to appoint you Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of Malawi, later as a senior cabinet minister for Economic Planning and Development and finally as Presidential Candidate for the United Democratic Front.

Your Excellency are aware that I single-handedly proposed your name against fierce protestation from senior members of the party; some of whom decided to leave the party in anger.

Your Excellency, I could not have invested huge personal resources into your campaign nor could I have asked other senior members to invest into your presidential campaign if your theory of hate is anything to go by.

Your Excellency, I would request you to regularly reflect and look over your shoulders in appreciation of the fact that what we leave behind is part of ourselves.

Your Excellency, most of all, as leaders, we must not throw away the ladders that take us to the rooftop and we must always pay special tribute to all that have contributed to our being what we have become.

Your Excellency, I am disappointed to read about your allegations on the state of your health. Let it be said that I am neither a sadist nor do I belong to a category of individuals that enjoy seeing others suffering or in pain nor do I celebrate when someone, whatever his or her disposition, is going through a bout of poor health.

Your Excellency, the state of your health has never been a subject of debate in the UDF and be rest assured that I, personally, and the UDF as a party, continue to wish you good health.

Your Excellency, your comments about my own health are ill-considered and made out of malice because by and large, I am in very good health.

Your Excellency, if at any time my health is not up to the mark, I will be the first one to go public about it as I have always done. I have never pretended to be such a person that cannot fall sick nor have I hidden the state of my health.

Your Excellency, it is true that I had suffered a slipped disc and this condition came about because of the grueling campaign of 2004 that I had undertaken on Your Excellency’s behalf.

Your Excellency, following the slipped disk, I have since undergone operations in South Africa and the United Kingdom and my recuperation has been satisfactory. I still have to go for regular check-ups as advised by my specialist doctors.

I am rather perturbed that you have quickly forgotten that the said slipped disc had been as a result of my active campaigning for you in 2004. I would request you to remember and appreciate my sacrifices and the sacrifices of other UDF leaders whom you fervently tout as enemies today.

Your Excellency, I would like to assure you that it is not true that I went through a blood draining operation in Egypt and that it is also not true that I have throat cancer.

I am disturbed with your claim that I suffer from category “A” diabetes and that I cannot stay very long time without eating food or else I would faint. Your Excellency, your information is wrong and malicious since you well know that this is not the case.

You worked with me as cabinet minister and you spent long hours with me during the 2004 grueling campaign, which at times saw us conduct ten (10) campaign meetings a day without taking food. You are also aware that I am a devout Muslim who observes thirty (30) days of fasting during the Holy month of Ramadan.

It smacks of sadism that Your Excellency can regurgitate information that is false and unfounded; especially considering the fact Your Excellency has demonstrated the rare courage of capturing this information on official record. I find this to be a very unfortunate situation and a demonstration of how much hate you hold against me.

Your Excellency, I would also wish to remind you that you have personally, or through your ministers, party functionaries and the public media, MBC and TVM demonized me, calling me all sorts of despicable names.

There are several other unfortunate actions that you have taken against me as the Former President, who worked so hard for your success. Similar actions have been taken against some of the senior members of the UDF and others sympathetic to the party.

Your Excellency, I have not forgotten my recent dehumanizing and disgraceful arrest at Kamuzu International Airport in June this year on trumped-up treason charges. That arrest was authorized by Your Excellency following your pronouncements at a rally in Nkhata Bay district.

I wonder if you really believe that I can plan to overthrow a government that I helped put together and also considering that from 1983 to 1993 together with so many courageous Malawians who did not run away from the dictatorship fought for multiparty democracy.

Your Excellency, in your letter, you make threats of my arrest and that of the so-called imaginary perpetrators alleged to be spreading what you describe as “diabolic lies” about Your Excellency.

Your Excellency, I am extremely surprised that these threats of arrest are being championed by Your Excellency as the Head of State because the power of arrest lies with the police who are expected to be apolitical whilst serving the government of the day and the power of adjudication is vested in the judiciary.

Your Excellency, as the first democratically-elected President, it worries me to realize that after 14 years of multiparty democracy coupled with the existence of a considerably good Republican Constitution, we still read and hear of the Head of State ordering arrests of political competitors! Your Excellency, I would advise you to stay clear of a leadership that believes in the subjugation of its citizens.

You may wish to know that our democratic agenda has all along been driven by repudiation of the highly noxious phenomenon of the cult of personality so that never again shall this country have one anointed personality sitting above the Republican Constitution, passing decrees and command arrests of citizens.

Your Excellency, I have never wished you dead. Rather that you have wished me and my colleagues in the UDF dead because a lot that can be proved by hard facts and evidence has happened during the past four years.

The bad treatment that you and your government are subjecting me to cannot be compared to the atrocities of the one-party dictatorship. I have also found it unfair that there are attempts to suffocate the UDF as a party through deliberate efforts targeting the top leadership. I must state without fear of contradiction that had Your Excellency not dumped the UDF, the party would have most likely settled for you as its Presidential Candidate for the 2009 General Elections.

I would therefore implore on Your Excellency to allow members of the UDF to field a Presidential Candidate of their choice without coercion and undue pressure from your office and members of your party. In this regard, I would like to personally ask you to tell your supporters in the DPP to stop meddling in the internal affairs of the UDF.

Your Excellency, I know that there are some in our country of feature on MBC and TVM posing as “experts” or “analysts” simply on the basis of their readiness to abandon all ethical conclusions and self-respect, at a cost to the taxpayer, to propagate entirely fabricated and negative notions about me and my colleagues in the UDF.

I cite the names of Messrs. Nawena, Ning’ang’a, Sawerengera, Banda, Ntaba, Dausi, Malopa, Mtumodzi, Molande, Sudi Sulaimana, Prof. Mphande, Mrs. Kaliati among others as the “experts” and “analysts” who are on your payroll to carry out the devilish agenda against me.

As Head of State and Government, you have a responsibility to steer this country towards a free and fair election in 2009, which is Your Excellency’s constitutional mandate and obligation.

Your Excellency, on my part, I can assure you that there is no iota of truth in the allegations that you have levelled against me. I can challenge you to provide evidence to substantiate any of your allegations.

Your Excellency, intelligence information has the potential to make or break leaders when not properly synthesized and utilized. I would encourage you to rigorously evaluate the information that you receive before embarking on a blame game.

Your Excellency, please accept my sincerest regards.
DR. BAKILI MULUZI