In politics, you must go on the offensive lest you should lose it, but not too offensive, lest you should botch it—Good Malawi Congress Party, I hope you’re listening.

Introduction

Currently, more and more voices are advocating for a different approach to our politics; many are saying it’s high time we tried someone who doesn’t belong to some political party. I don’t really know why, but I think one reason could be frustration that the party entrusted with the checking of excesses of power in the country, the Malawi Congress Party, have themselves been found wanting—they are faithfully replicating the 1964 Cabinet Crisis albeit at a party level. I don’t think we should give up on them completely; perhaps we should try to help them see something in the hope that they can change and serve us all better.

Optimism then Pessimism, and that’s what the Malawi Congress Party are known for

Only three months ago, in October, to be precise, the Malawi Congress Party, MCP, had won important by-elections, some in areas, traditionally ruling Democratic Progressive Party, DPP, bastion. Following that achievement, the MCP ran places—a resurrection. In that mood, they stormed Mzuzu—a Northern Region town, in fact, one of Malawi’s four cities—for a meeting whose aim was to show all and sundry the MCP was a united party on the move, towards victory come 2019. At the meeting was Richard Msowoya (the Party’s Vice-President), Gustav Kaliwo (the Party’s Secretary General) and the new boy on the block, Sidik Mia. A (front-page) banner in The Sunday Times (dated December 10, 2017) announced the unison: MCP STORMS MZUZU. And its two strap lines told it all: “Msowoya, Kaliwo, Mia in attendance” and “Heavyweights defect to MCP”. A month later, The Nation (dated January 29, 2018) was to give the lie to it all when it announced: “MCP Suspends Msowoya, Kaliwo”. And a few days hence, The Nation (Friday, February 2, 2018) had this to say: MSOWOYA, OTHERS BLOCK MCP VERDICT. The real story was in the strap line: “Obtain court order to stop firing, suspensions.” Full circle.

Drawing comparison between the current fallout and the September 1964 Cabinet Crisis

In The Nation dated Tuesday, February 6, 2018, DD Phiri made an interesting observation on these wrangles, comparing the fallout to that of September 1964, when Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda turned against men and women who had invited him to lead in the fight for Independence (see “MCP about to repeat 1964 Scenario”). DD Phiri explains why Dr Banda had turned against these young intelligent men and women: “This he (Dr Banda) did because those who surrounded him were saying there were no loyal followers out there. His informants wanted jobs for themselves and some of them did get them.” He does not shirk from the truth: “Those who left were the cream of the MCP.” And of the crop being harassed today, he says, “. . . some of the brightest cohorts like fired Director of Research Felix Jumbe, sacked Spokesperson Jessie Kabwira, Secretary General Gustav Kaliwo and Vice-President Richard Msowoya.” He does not end there; he makes his mind known: “This is a pity.” He then proffers some simple advice to Dr Chakwera, MCP President: “Rise above intrigue. Flatterers are never true friends. Judas Iscariot kissed Jesus while handing him over to his enemies.”

DD Phiri’s final question is instructive and warning at the same: “If a leader cannot achieve unity of his party, how can he (be expected to) achieve unity of a nation?”

You can never beat a man or a woman who knows history.

The origins of the current fallout in the MCP

Minor skirmishes have been very much present in the MCP camp all along, but the current major fallout started circa January 2017, when the Malawi Congress Party President, Lazarus Chakwera, admitted meeting a number of people in the country, people he was persuading to join his Party, MCP. The most prominent name of them all has been that of Al Haj Muhammed Sidik Mia.

According to “Chakwera admits persuading Mia, others into MCP: Political renaissance” by Chris Loka (see www.nyasatimes.com dated January 8, 2017), Mia had abandoned the People’s Party of Joyce Banda or JB in 2014 after the latter had opted for Sosten Gwengwe for the PP Vice-Presidency in the 2014 General Elections, the Elections JB was to lose to Peter Mutharika of the DPP. However, before that, Mia had been to every former ruling party in the democratic dispensation—the United Democratic Front of Bakili Muluzi, the Democratic Progressive Party of Bingu wa Mutharika, and of course, JB’s People’s Party. Apparently, some MCP members are not happy with this history. Again, they seem not to be happy with the manner Mia has conducted or sold himself in the Malawi Congress Party, where, once he had described some Party officials as lebwedelebwede, a demeaning term equivalent to lazybones. Perhaps he wanted to mean they do not contribute to the success of the Party as much as he could if given the ‘opportunity’.

Only three months after joining the MCP, the Party made huge gains in the country, winning a number of seats in the October 17 by-elections, some in ruling DPP’s very strongholds in the Southern Region. And soon after these victories, Mia told Party officials from the Southern Region of the country (where he comes from) he was going to stand for the post of vice-president in MCP: “From today I want everyone to know that during the forthcoming party convention, I will contest for no other position, but the vice presidency of the Malawi Congress Party. That is it; I stand by it, and I am very ready.” (see “Mia declares interest in Malawi Congress Party VP Post: MPs endorse him” January 17, 2018 by Osman Faiti on www.nyasatimes.com)

The article goes on to say, in the Central Region district of Lilongwe (it also happens to be the country’s capital city), a communiqué issued at the end of a meeting by MCP law-makers there endorsed Mia for the post.

For an outside observer like me, the message to Msowoya is crystal clear—he must forget the VP post and therefore the running-mate slot for the MCP at the country's 2019 General Elections.

Which camp is right?

First of all, I think it is important to note that over the years, there have always been two MCPs. Put simply, there have always been an MCP within the MCP. I should give a little explanation on this.

There are people who claim that some of the atrocities that happened during Dr Banda’s era were not known to or sanctioned by him. Mapanje in A Democracy of Chameleons: Politics and Culture in the New Malawi (2002: 183) makes the following observation: “Banda remained the ultimate architect of the monstrosities that were inflicted on Malawi’s supposed dissidents. Invented dissidents continued to be unnecessarily arrested, tied up hand and foot, blind-folded, beaten, shoved into sacks and dropped in the Shire River for the crocodiles.”

In other words, whatever was happening, the ultimate architect was Dr Banda. However, this same article suggests that the whole reason Mr Aaron Gadama, Mr Dick Matenje, Mr David Chiwanga and Mr Twaibu Sangala were murdered in May 1983 had to do with their search for moderation in the MCP at the time.

According to Mapanje, in 1983, Dr Banda had proposed that John Tembo be the President, as Dr Banda was planning to retire from politics. He adds that following this proposal, “Aaron Gadama, Dick Matenje, David Chiwanga and Twaibu Sangala, the most liberal of his senior MPs, bravely reminded (emphasis mine) Banda what the (1966) Malawi Constitution said in the event of the President retiring” (2002: 182). Mapanje says Dr Banda said he wouldn't want to see these MPs when Parliament next met, something Mapanje says, was construed to mean he wanted them dead. And Mapanje says eventually Dr Banda did not retire, something he attributes to counsel from Police Inspector General Lunguzi, Army Chief Khanga, Young Pioneer Chief Mlotha, and his Secretary to the President and Cabinet John Ngwiri. On this Mapanje observes:

. . . his intended hand-over of power to John Tembo never happened. Some people argued that he had not intended to give up power in the first place; no despots have been known to. Others claimed that for once Banda had listened to his security council: Police Inspector General Lunguzi, Army Chief Khanga, Young Pioneer Chief Mlotha, and his Secretary to the President and Cabinet John Ngwiri or their predecessors who were still influential (2002: 182).

Again, when Focus Gwede (Deputy Head, later Head, of the Special Branch, Malawi’s intelligence unit under the Police Force) boasted before Sam Mpasu, it was obvious he (Gwede) considered himself the ultimate authority as far as detention terms were concerned:

“Listen to me, my friend! You are finished, finished, finished! I am the last word on detention in Malawi. No one else is above me. As you sit there, I have three options for you. Firstly, I can release you now. Yes, you can go home to your wife and back to your job. Secondly, I can take you to court for trial where you will get many years of imprisonment. Lastly, I can send you to Mikuyu Maximum Security Prison, without trial, where you will count the hair on your head. You will never come out. I have decided to send you to Mikuyu where others like you are rotting,” he said chillingly (Mpasu, 2002: 76).

Besides, there is documented evidence of people being instructed by the Late MacWilliam Lunguzi (Inspector General of Police) upon their release from Mikuyu Maximum Security Prison never to make it known they were out, and all this, upon instruction straight from Dr Banda. In short, if there was a camp which Dr Banda would trust on some matters, advising it never to reveal it to some members until everything was finished (in terms of releasing prisoners), it should tell us there were others who were not as overzealous.

When multiparty came at the turn of the 1990s, my uncle worked as a senior police officer in Zomba. He desperately wanted me to become a police officer like my father, but it was a job I did not like—not because it is a bad job; because I am 1.58 m, and I did not feel comfortable at this ‘height’ in the police force, otherwise, I so much adore and respect this great profession.

The other day I was with him, we saw one of the Kaliwos—not sure whether Gustav or George. When he greeted him, and they parted, he said to me: “Him and his brother serve His Excellency the President so well.” He added: “Like Lunguzi, these boys are very, very good, very, very dedicated to His Excellency the Life President.”

Gustav Kaliwo and George Kaliwo were to be part of Dr Banda’s legal team. Elsewhere in 1995, they represented Mr John Tembo, Mr Leston Likaomba and Mr MacDonald Kalemba (see Tembo, Kalemba and Likaomba v Republic, Criminal Case No 1 of 1995).

Anyone who knows history of the Malawi Congress would be out of their senses to label Gustav a sellout. He is true MCP only that he belongs to the camp of the liberals, call them nkholokolo if you want, for to be moderate is to be a nkholokolo in my mother’s party, MCP.

In “A Classic Dictator” Caroline Alexander (1995) recounts a visit she had paid Dr Banda in 1995. This was only a year after losing power to Bakili Muluzi.

According to Caroline, in the room were Cecilia Kadzamira and Gustav Kaliwo, a lawyer Mama said was ‘helping His Excellency with his case’. In fact, Caroline says it was Gustav that had arranged this meeting, and according to Caroline, Kaliwo’s rationale for this was that “the discussion of certain interests dear to his heart (literature and classics) would be stimulating and good for his morale.”

Caroline, once a lecturer at Chancellor College in the early 1980s, also observes that only a week before, Dr Banda had been declared unfit to stand trial and so would be tried in absentia. According to Caroline, “the diagnosis was hypertension and some minor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, but his most obvious affliction was an acute loss of memory. He could not, it seemed, remember the hour or the day or the year before though he was still capable of lucid, even elegant, conversation along carefully selected lines.”

What is important to observe here is the fact that Kaliwo was monitoring the conversation to make sure his man did not go astray. Perhaps his fear was that if Caroline would sense a complete sensible flow in the discussion, she would doubt the diagnosis of ‘unfit to stand trial’. There Kaliwo and Mama ensured that when the conversation was going political, the man was withdrawn. This was 1995.

Kaliwo has been MCP all through. To say such a man would sell himself out can be troubling to those who know him. I insist that many people who accuse Kaliwo of selling himself out to the DPP simply do not know the heart of steel that is Kaliwo (and perhaps how close he was to Dr Banda as a person in the hour of Dr Banda’s greatest need).

In short, Kaliwo, Kabwira, Msowoya and others represent the moderate or liberals, rule-following or rule-abiding MCP which Kamuzu was re-introducing before his death when he surrendered his power to Gwanda Chakuamba. Unfortunately, there is still a group of people who want to run the MCP the radical way of old, and are never scared when their constitution is being purloined at will. In this radical MCP, anyone who reminds them of sanity is a rebel, a sellout, a nkholokolo or kapirikoni, same dangerous terms of old, terms that saw many condemned for merely expressing themselves, dangerous terms which were used as a justification to shed blood of innocent and most productive Malawians in the one-party era. The source of all this is deliberate disregard of the power of history. According to Caroline, Kamuzu himself had made a point on this problem when he lectured his Parliament the other time on the ‘trouble with Africa,’ which he (Dr Banda) had attributed to “too many ignorant people who do not know anything about history, and if they do know anything about it they do not know how to interpret and apply it.”

I personally do not see why a party as big as the MCP would, for whatever reason, accept to violate their constitution and throw respect and caution to the wind all because Mia promises a Southern Region vote. In fact, as far as I am concerned, a better vote for MCP will come from the North, Msowoya’s camp, than from the South (where we have a lot of silent vote). If you disrespect Msowoya, how would you hope for a North vote? What MCP should have done was to allow open competition for all seats including Chakwera’s. Why it is only Msowoya’s seat that seems to have gone ‘unopposed’ even before the convention, is beyond me. At the same time, MCP should tame its boys and girls in red and green; those boys are causing a lot of damage to the image of the Party—they remind some of us of the ‘freedom’ with which similar boys then would take any matter in their own hands.

I know there are people who claim that MCP in the North is not necessarily because of Msowoya; I cannot buy that, and I think I am not being irrational on this. Politics is a system of distribution and allocation of resources; who would not want their representative take some influential position in the system?

These so-called nkholokolos are a true representative of the MCP Kamuzu wanted. Unfortunately, most MCP members obey without questions. To them, questioning means disunity, disloyalty, disobedience and indiscipline. If these values—unity, loyalty, obedience, discipline—are there to be obeyed for gospel truth, then we should feel sorry for you for not taking your time on history. Many judge against the Msowoya-Kaliwo-Kabwira camp simply because it is on the opposite end of Dr Lazarus Chakwera’s. I don’t think this should be the way to judge them.

And before I finish this section, let me laugh at the claim some MCP officials make about the disagreements which are now turning into war in the MCP, namely that such squabbles are healthy for the Party’s life. Really? You consider such shameful disturbances and diversions healthy? And wait a minute, with such mind and thinking you want to take over the ‘huger’ responsibility or running the affairs of a nation? Never ever describe such things as healthy, please, for Malawi’s sake, please.

Let the MCP go on the offensive

If the MCP wants to win over hearts and minds, it must go on the offensive. I will help it see what I mean by this by citing a few examples from the United States. These are on Richard Nixon, JF Kennedy and Donald Trump—Republican, Democrat and Republican, respectively.

Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon, a Quaker with Irish background, was the thirty-seventh President of the United States. He defeated Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and was inaugurated in 1969. Previously Nixon had served as Vice-President to a fellow Republican, Dwight D Eisenhower (Ike), the thirty-fourth President of the United States. However, before that he had served as Senator after defeating Congressman Jerry Voorhis in 1946. Nixon was to be re-elected in 1972—landslide victory over George McGovern—but before the end of his tenure, he resigned the Presidency on August 9, 1974, just in time before the final impeachment nail following the Watergate Scandal. He is the only US President to ever resign from office—very bad history.

I would like to show my reader that Nixon’s rise was a result of learning the power of taking the battle to the ‘enemy’, something I describe as going offensive. At the same time, I will show that his fall was again, a result of going too offensive to annoy the general mood.

According to Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man, 1970, Nixon came into power first after winning Congressman Jerry Voorhis’ Democrat’s seat after attacking him (Voorhis) for being a left-wing, i.e. for tolerating Communists. This had made Nixon realise that by ‘attacking’ others you make yourself visible, known or even liked. Later, as a Congressman, Nixon used his position to ‘expose’ and ‘grill’ Alger Hiss, accusing him of being a spy in some atomic espionage rings. But to pin down Hiss, he had to have the right arsenal at his disposal. So, a first-term Congressman Nixon soon persuaded Bert Andrews, chief of the Herald Tribune’s Washington bureau, a recently recipient of the Pulitzer Prize then, to help him hound Hiss. Throughout the investigation, Nixon had Andrews on his side.

Hiss (a Lawyer himself and credited with establishing the United Nations) was convicted, and Lawyer and Congressman Nixon became a political star. He was learning that by crucifying others, by making others weak, you carve yourself some political space or place. Soon, in 1953, he became Vice-President to Dwight D Eisenhower.

In 1960, he stood for President himself. He was to lose it to JF Kennedy, a loss that was to teach him a lesson, one that would help him win years later, in 1968, a loss that was to spell his fall even years later, in August 1974.

Nixon who believed going on the offensive against an opponent, met a match in JFK in 1960. JFK too was using the same tactic. According to Garry Wills, Nixon explained his loss to JFK on two issues: bad breaks during campaign owing to staph infection that hospitalized him for some precious weeks, and tactical errors as he had wanted to campaign in all states. Wills says he disagreed that he had made a blunder in accepting a TV debate against JFK, his offensive match. However, unknowingly Nixon accepted that he had made a great miscalculation in accepting to debate Kennedy: Wills quotes him (p 74): “Kennedy was attacking a record and I was defending it. . .  But I know from long experience that in debate, the man who can attack has a built-in advantage that is very hard to overcome.”

Nixon is accepting that when you are on the defensive, you have no room, perhaps this is why Hillary Clinton didn’t make it or why Joyce Banda evaded the TV debates here in Malawi.

What  Nixon seems to suggest is that whoever is put on the defensive loses it. As Wills puts it (p 75): “The very core of his electioneering technique had been a refusal to be put on the defensive.”

Nixon had learnt from Murray Chotiner, another lawyer, that “you let the public know as little as possible about your opinions, and you forced it (the public) to know everything possible about a select portion of your opponent’s view.” This principle is on the belief that people do not necessarily vote for you, but they vote against someone or something. In short, people do not vote for you because they like you; they vote for you because they hate something about the policies of your opponent, and so to avoid that one coming in, they vote you in.

In Malawi, during the 2009 General Elections, Bakili Muluzi, a heavyweight in the Eastern Region supported John Tembo (of the Central Region) against Bingu wa Mutharika of the Southern Region. Eastern Region being a Southern Region province supported Bingu though their heavyweight had supported Tembo. It proved one thing: they didn’t like something about Tembo, and this they showed by voting him out by voting Bingu in.

In the world on Nixon, being offensive meant starting the campaign early, accusing the ‘opponent’, and if he tries to put you on the defensive, “Just don’t answer” (p 78). And (p 78) “if, after a while, that becomes impossible, contrive a way to turn the tables and make an attack out of your explanation.”

Nixon had taken advantage of the incumbent Lyndon Johnson (though he was not seeking re-election) who was fighting many battles at the time, most notably race relations and Vietnam. He was a man on the defensive and Nixon had all the firepower against the Democrats. However, it is this zeal to attack that defined his fall in 1974 after he had carried it too far.

In June 1972, Nixon sent five men to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel complex. At first, the story had been dabbed a local story which Nixon described as bias and misleading yet two reporters of The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein plus their editor Ben Bradlee gave it continual coverage and visibility until it attracted public attention and Senate hearings. Nixon protested, saying “I am not a crook,” but the people eventually realised he was. He had to resign in 1974 or else he would be legally forced out through impeachment.

What had destroyed Nixon’s sweet political career was his overdoing; he had gone too far in his attempts to put his opponent on the defensive. It boomeranged—he who lives by the political sword was to ‘die’ by it.

JF Kennedy

John Frederick Kennedy or JFK was the thirty-fifth President of the United States. He had taken over from Dwight D Eisenhower (or as Kennedy called him ‘old asshole’ and Eisenhower called him ‘Little Boy Blue’) but he (Kennedy) had defeated Richard Nixon to the Presidency. Kennedy’s Vice was Lyndon Johnson (Johnson was to take over after Kennedy’s assassination that Friday, November 22, 1963).

People who are on the defensive must understand their weaknesses and learn how to handle them to their advantage. “On November 8, 1960, Kennedy received 34,226,731 votes to 34,108,157 for Nixon, winning an Electoral College majority of 303 to 219. Over the next three years, he often stuck a slip of paper into his pocket to remind himself of that tiny vote margin: 118,574 votes” (Richard Reeves, 1993 President Kennedy: Profile of Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, p 18).

When he expressed his intention to stand for President in 1960, Charles Bartlett of the Chatanooga Times asked why the rush. “No, they will forget me. Others will come along,” was his reply (p 16).

Kennedy had attacked the establishment. Reeves quotes the summary Walter Lippmann made on the three themes of Kennedy’s general election campaign: “The military power of the United States is falling behind that of the Soviet Union. . . .the American economy is stagnating. . . falling behind the Soviet Union . . . and the leading industrial nations of Western Europe. The United States is failing to modernize itself: the public services, education, health, rebuilding of the cities, transportation, and the like, are not keeping up with a rapidly growing urbanized population” (17).

Kennedy was a man taking the political war to his 'enemy', himself (Nixon) a believer in taking the war to the 'enemy'.

Despite all this, Kennedy was a “compartmentalized man with much to hide, comfortable with secrets and lies” (19).

Reeves observes that “Kennedy had received the last rites of the Catholic Church at least four times as an adult (that) he was something of a medical marvel, kept alive by complicated daily combinations of pills and injections” (24). Yet when asked whether he had Addison’s disease, he replied without blinking his eye: “I never had Addison’s disease. In regard to my health . . . my health is excellent” (24).

Despite these claims, Reeves (1993: 43) observes: “In truth, boy and man, he was sick and in pain most of the time, often using crutches or a cane in private to rest his back, and taking medication, prescribed and unprescribed, each day, sometimes every hour. He had trouble fighting off ordinary infections and suffered recurrent fevers that raged as high as 106 degrees.”

Leaders and health is a very sensitive subject; no leader accepts they can fall ill yet sickness is part of us as humans.

Only two weeks ago, the former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo wrote a letter, requesting his country’s President Muhammadu Buhari, 74, not to seek re-election next year because of age and ill-health. I do not think Buhari will take heed to this ‘nonsense’.

Donald Trump

Among the reasons political analysts give as to why and how Donald Trump ended up winning the American Elections in 2016 is that Trump was an outsider fighting the establishment or the insider. In other words he was attacking, on the offensive, an advantaged agent of change from the outside in a terrain affected by great discontent and distrust of the establishment. This is exactly what Nixon observed, that when you are on the defensive the possibility for losing it is very high.

And like Nixon, he had to do it the Watergate way through Russia when lots of emails from Hillary ended up in the hands of Trump’s campaign team. Like Nixon, he believed that when you get the better of your opponent, you beat him or her into retreat, squeezing them to some defensive, disadvantaged position. It worked for him though not sure for how long.

In so many ways Trump is like Nixon even in demeaning his opponents, softening them for some attack. However, when such a person meets a match as was the case in 1960 when Nixon met another offensive personality—JFK—they begin to bend and lose the invincibility.

Trump has failed to bully the North Korean leader Kim because when Trump uses an offensive or bully tactic, Kim chooses a more suiting one for a man at the helm of world power. I personally do not believe Kim can let loose his arsenals, but that he uses them as a tool for negotiation. I think his greatest fear is to go down the Gadhafi or Saddam way. For me, Trump and Kim fit in the Tortoise and Leopard folktale one Salima once told me long ago.

Tortoise who had picked a quarrel with Leopard received word from the latter that he would pay his compound a visit the following day to finish him. Tortoise accepted death but wanted to leave a mark for posterity’s sake. He uprooted trees, pulled out rocks, making the place look desolate. When other animals asked what he was doing, his response was simple: “I’m dying tomorrow, but I don’t want to die without giving the impression I had given Leopard a run in it all.” And when Leopard heard this, he felt ashamed and decided not to kill him lest he should feel embarrassed when others say, “Leopard killed Tortoise but it was after a struggle” yet there was no struggle at all.

Trump has described Kim Jong-un as ‘Little rocket man’, from a ‘depleted and food starved regime’. Kim has called him ‘old’, and in return Trump has called him ‘short and fat’. Later Kim described Trump as ‘dotard’ or simply old lunatic.

When he describes Hillary as ‘Crooked Hillary’ she keeps cool, no rhetorical match. When he describes Haiti, El Salvador and Africa as ‘shithole’ countries we whine away lest we should lose aid. But Kim is his Tortoise and eventually the Leopard will give way. In many ways I see Trump resembling Nixon though I am not sure he shall end the same way as Nixon—with the invocation of the 25th Amendment.

MCP needs good PR and not merely Advertisement

“Dausi apologises for MCP’s chequered past: ‘I will reveal a lot in 2019 campaign’ by Tiwonge Kumwenda has attracted a lot of comments on www.nyasatimes.com. In the article, Mr Nicholas Dausi who is also Minister of Information and Communication Technology declares that, to deflate the MCP, his party, the DPP, shall use incriminating audio recordings of the 1992 MCP Convention where the delegates had conspired to kill Catholic Bishops for authoring a Pastoral Letter that accused the MCP of misrule and human rights violations. According to the article, Dausi, who also juggles as Government Spokesperson by the virtue of being Minister of Information, proffers that the clips will prove to all and sundry MCP’s dangerous past. It will destroy their image, he says.

This Dausi was once, in this very multiparty Malawi, MCP’s Vice President, and before the rebirth of democracy in the early 1990s, he had served as a member of Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s personal army—the Malawi Young Pioneers, where he was very close to Dr Banda.

“First of all, let me confess here that I was in MCP,” he declares before prancing: “and I know everything they do and they have done.”

Shortly after, he warns, “I shall reveal evil things about the Party soon and will air the 1992 violent recorded clips during campaign period in order to deal with it (MCP).”

And he goes on, “This party’s not changed, and will not. If it’s changed, why firing its Vice President (Msowoya), Secretary General (Gustav Kaliwo) and Spokesperson (Jessie Kabwira) among others without valid reasons? How many will Chakwera fire if he can take (over) Government? What kind of man of GOD who does not want to be faulted?”

What Dausi is doing here is nothing but being offensive. And the MCP have gone on the defensive, a very difficult position. And the reason? Their fear to deal with their past the intelligent way.

I have said many times why MCP should never shirk from talking about her past, because that is the only way they can shake off the demons of their past. Their argument is that the MCP that killed or tortured is long gone, that this is the new MCP, that those in it today do not share that dark history.

True, you could not be the direct heirs or the people at the helm of the bloodshed, but the fact that you keep this machine going without cleansing it of its dark past still makes it a sort of guillotine in our democracy. If you read history well, apologies are still being made the world over, over atrocities committed by a people’s forefathers way, way before they were born. Why is that the case? Closure requires honesty, and honesty is the only way others can accept to go the same route with you.

I know the fear of many is that this can trigger resentment or retribution. I don’t think so; in fact, this is why you need great strategists in MCP, men and women with great skill of reasoning, men and women with great foresight and tact, or ‘brightest men and women,’ to quote DD Phiri.

By dealing with your past, by making the people know who you are, you will be going it the offensive route. You can never improve your image simply by inviting a Pastor into your fold; the issue is beyond a human Pastor. And worse still, for whatever reason, the Pastor has been advised to pattern his approach after Dr Banda’s, and that is not helping things either. I have seen some of his portraits, especially this one where he stands hands on the headrest of a carved chair. And as if all that is not enough, I see a repeat of the pattern of the MCP of old where a ‘rebel’ is denounced left, right and centre, before finally being ‘banished’ or expelled. Why do you keep repeating this? I think I have the answer: you do not know your history, or you know it but do not want to confront it head on.

Be manly, be bold, take this political bull by the horns, work towards improving your image the revolutionary way. And let me be brutal with you on this: Msowoya would be a better part of that image reshaping. You know why? Well, the North suffered most, and you need a leader from there to lead in accepting you as a changed entity. And what do you do instead? You come South where Gwanda with all his role in the MCP came from. Don’t you think you’re missing something, MCP, the Party of my mother?

You need good PR, good MCP. You don’t need advertisement as you do. And let me divert a bit, to give you a small distinction between Public Relations and Advertisement.

The British Institute of Public Relations (as cited in Frank Jefkins’ Public Relations, 1998: 6) defines PR as “the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organization and its publics (also called myriad stakeholders).” This means that PR should be deliberate, continuous, and born out of research with the purpose to make the people understand and trust the entity concerned. It is not a political campaign which has time; PR goes on throughout the organisation’s lifetime. This goes beyond marketing the entity; it is the building or rebuilding of its image so the people develop respect for that organization and make right decisions in favour of that organization (because they understand such a decision is in those people’s interests as well).

“Public Relations practitioners need to identify and segment publics to increase the possibility of achieving communication goals with these publics” (Jeong-Nam Kim, Lan Ni and Bey-Ling Sha, 2008: 752), and remember that the simplest segmentation of publics is that by Dewey as shows the following table:

Type of publics	Characteristics
Latent	The group faces a similar problem but does not detect it
Aware	Group members subsequently recognise the problem
Active	Organises to discuss and do something about the problem
Nonpublics	They do not even know there is a problem or there could be one

When segmenting the publics, two factors are crucial—strategic threats and strategic opportunities. The MCP go the strategic opportunities route and that is why they think Mia is the better option than Msowoya (and the DPP go both—I shall discuss this someday). What the MCP forget is that a small strategic threat has the potential to wipe out a whole lot of strategic opportunities.

The MCP listen so much from the aware publics at the expense of the other three categories. The majority of the people who talk about Malawi’s ills are the aware publics often represented by journalists and opinion makers or so-called political scientists. You can never win an election with them; you need to reach out to the other segments as well, and PR, an important component of strategic management, helps you accomplish that. The whole reason the DPP won the 2014 General Elections was that they had segmented the publics and adopted strategies to reach out to each one of them. The choice of their running-mate at the time, Saulosi Chilima, tells it all—it had been a serious homework and strategy.

The MCP thought that their image would improve outright by bringing in Chakwera; no, or perhaps yes at the first two PR stages (stakeholder stage and public stage), but not at this third stage (crisis stage). You have a job to do, guys. You need to look at each section of the Party—from individuals to history, to make the people understand you. A lot of people do not understand you, and it’s all because you have not made effort to make the people appreciate your existence is for the good of Malawi’s democracy; you’re not proactive, you’re not offensive.

There are lots of speculations about many things about you. A good example is the fear that many Southerners have that Dr Chakwera isn’t the leader but someone merely put for us to accept the MCP (when the actual forces are lying in wait). Shall we not see them rising from the ‘ashes’ someday and say, “We’re back in town, and we’ll pay tenfold.”?

Well, you can never defend yourself from this because you have very weak PR machinery. In fact, I see little of PR in the people you choose for the job. You could think you’re doing it, but it’s all the advertisement rather than the PR way.

At page 7, Jefkins defines advertisement as “presenting the most persuasive possible selling message to the right prospects for the product or service at the lowest possible cost.” Advertising thus entails marketing, and marketing is only a facet of PR. The MCP needs much more than merely selling themselves, which is what they are doing now; they need to touch the heart of the people, to show them the MCP has a better system for Malawi.

I keep telling people that the ills of this nation aren’t corruption or bad leadership or whatever you may wish to call it; the ills of Malawi lie in that we do not have a fireproof system of democracy that won’t let in manipulation. To defeat corruption, you need an open, transparent, accountable and responsive system of government. If you put on paper such a system, if you practise such a system in your Party, the light of democracy shall shine upon you.

Just suppose, the MCP as a Party would say, “We have made available each member’s fortune to prove to all and sundry we believe in transparency, et cetera,” what do you think would be the people’s reaction? But you wait for the Directorate of Declaration of Assets to invite you to do that. Your leader is building a mansion, from what I hear, how open on it is he? Opening on such things would buy you support that you mean different. But if you do the same thing the ruling DPP does, where will our morale and courage to give you our vote come from? Wouldn’t it be fair then to let this eater ravage us even more? This is why I say I can never exchange one eater for another; this time we need someone who can show us he doesn’t intend to eat, but to serve. You do not demonstrate that yet, however, you can if you decide to go offensive, that is to say, proactive in your approach to issues.

In a nutshell, the Malawi Congress Party need strong PR because PR targets all rather than a select group. It is only by working on this facet that the Malawi Congress Party can go on the offensive, otherwise, they are an easy prey with just so much in their cupboard.

Conclusion

First, the Malawi Congress Party must, like it or not, put their house in order. Because, no matter what you do, if you keep demonstrating to us that you live like fighting cocks—no one will listen to any message of change you might wish to get to thems. After that, straight-away, go on the offensive, to improve your image. Do not shirk from discussing your history, which, in fact, is our history, because we were all MCP. The communication facet requires the best personnel, so get the best, someone conversant with history, psychology, law, name it. Sometimes, when they attack you too much, do not respond. Remember however, going on the offensive does not mean putting others to shame lest what had befallen Nixon befalls you. Don’t call them Prince of Thieves lest they should remind you of history and hit you where it pains most. In a nutshell, going on the offensive means working on your image to make the people understand you while you pick on your opponent’s weak policy areas. Democracy without a strong opposition ceases to be one; that is why we want you shine, MCP. If you fail, don’t say we never warned you. Good luck.

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