Mutharika pushing Malawi towards a military coup and civil strife

The debate over President Bingu Mutharika’s arrest of UDF politicians, as well as senior serving army officers and retired military and police chiefs on the allegations of plotting a coup continues, with gravely disturbing reflections on the country’s deep-seated political crisis.

Evidently, Mutharika has not only accused former president - Dr Bakili Muluzi for masterminding the alleged plot to overthrow his government. But, the President has brought in new dimensions to his unending use of treason as a repressive weapon, which is, the forceful association of army and ‘police’ officers into the political equation.

The likely consequence of the President’s recent actions could be the politicisation of the military and the militarisation of politics – scenarios that can only end up in untold civil strife. In the wider African political context, what Mutharika has done is a simple and straightforward invitation of the army to make a coup.

In salvaging his diminishing political power, the president is also sowing seeds of discord, suspicion and hatred into the Malawian society as well as the specialised security institutions like the army, police and intelligence services.

Meanwhile, Malawi is being transformed into a police state whereby Mutharika is becoming more and more dependent on the coercive and authoritarian use of force by the police, state intelligence services and the arbitrary application of laws.

In the present atmosphere, Mutharika is trying to disable political activity and decapitate opposition political parties - a factor which could negatively impact on next year’s general elections.

Equally, whilst the president is desperately attempting to consolidate his increasingly weakened grip on power, he might just be frightened at the thought of an impending defeat in the up-coming polls.

The coup allegations could thus, be aimed at both overshadowing the existing political impasse and deliberately triggering commotion and political instability, so that the forth-coming elections are disrupted or postponed for Mutharika to get a new lease of life. Most probably, long enough to extend the term of his presidency beyond May 2009. The way events are unfolding, Mutharika might wake up one day only to declare state of emergency.

It is doubtful if solid evidence will be brought against the arrested politicians, as well as military and security service officers. Already, it has been revealed that a senior government official has said that there is at the moment no evidence to connect opposition leaders’ Muluzi and ‘ John Tembo’ to the alleged coup.

Undeniably, the simplistic creation of coup scenarios by government has become troubling; especially when one realises that such tactics are starting to appear extremely primitive, yet, with far reaching consequences.

The polarisation and antagonism, which is presently being propagated in the country, could in the long run cause dangerous sectarian recriminations and unmanageable violence in form of fight-backs and revenge attacks as outright victimisation between conflicting political groups grows.

The resultant effect is intolerable suffering and intractable civil strife for all the people of Malawi as has happened in other African countries. Besides, the problem with Mutharika’s association of the military and security services in the coup plot is that the president is in actual fact, antagonising some elements in the army - a situation whose effect is three-fold.

Firstly, the Malawi Defence Force has relatively been divorced from politics, and many people find it unimaginable that the army, or elements within it, can all of a sudden hatch plans with politicians to overthrow the government.

Subsequently, the victimisation of some serving army officers could turn out to be divisive for the army and potentially inviting of a coup from disgruntled officers within the rank and file as well as retired security officers.

This divisiveness can also manifest itself in terms of political inclination and ethnicity, a condition, which could definitely be fed by nepotism and cronyism.

With this latest wave of coup accusations involving the armed forces and retired security chiefs, innocent policemen and military officers will be put under intense unwarranted scrutiny from within and the surveillance by elements from state intelligence services, who are already masters in the art of creating fictitious evidence meant to enable the purging of those thought to have sympathies for the opposition.

Secondly, the president is injecting politics into the mind-set of the army and alerting it to the possibility of taking over power. This is a process, which could give the army impetus to safeguard its stake within national politics in order to secure its link and integrity with any incumbent government. Concurrently, this could become a problematic setting, which future leaders would have to exploit to guarantee their own survival.

Thus, the army could become more engaged in political activism, whilst hypocritical and power-hungry leaders would become more and more dependent on the men in uniform for their evil existence. As is well known, Mutharika has graduated from hazardously attempting to push the Army into politics before, as witnessed in its deployment to stop a UDF rally in Mulanje last year.

Thirdly, Mutharika has in effect, started to militarise national politics by transforming political activity into a violent game-play, which takes place in an oppressive and strictly authoritarian landscape, where gun-totting security operatives roundly batter political opponents. The police and other security services are, accordingly, being enticed into becoming coercive participants in the political body fabric itself.

As it were, Malawians can hardly imagine how Mutharika is quickly generating an exceedingly tyrannical and repressive rule by using security services as his personal guard-dogs for instance; searching of residences, intelligence surveillance and the operation of overbearing roadblocks etc. Increasingly, security agents are being invisibly led into deployment with big-brother eyes to unleash terror and violence. Now, what is the difference between Mutharika and Kamuzu Banda?

Before clocking one year in office upon assuming power in 2004, Mutharika accused three politicians of taking guns to a meeting with the president in order to kill him, as a forth-accused person was purportedly arrested with knives. As a result, UDF senior member Harry Thomson, deputy minister Roy Comsy and MP Alfred Mwechumu were charged of treason. In 2006, the republican vice president, Cassim Chilumpha was detained to answer treason charges upon the accusation of plotting to assassinate the president. Several other politicians have been arrested on abortive treason allegations.

Some people are pointing at Mutharika as a president who has become frustrated, distressed, wholly apprehensive and thus, is almost blundering with his thoughts and making irrational decisions as well as engaging in illogical actions.

Actually, it is shocking to hear of inexplicable allegations on countries like Britain, Taiwan and Mozambique; being linked to the supposed coup plot on the assumption that they assisted in supplying artillery to the coup-plotters.

Certainly, the main aim of such outbursts on the involvement of foreign countries is to convince Malawians that the coup fairy-story is a genuine one. However, the implications of such weird and wild accusations, which lie bare without any single grain of concrete evidence, could be severe damage to Malawi’s foreign relations with the accused countries.

On the whole, Mutharika has been a very weak politician whose hysterical deeds are bound to backfire on him. And, many people perceive the seeming manifestation of casual pronouncements of imaginary coup attempts or non-existent assassination plots, as Mutharika’s maverick strategy for survival through systematic elimination of his political enemies.

Obviously, Malawians cannot afford to let the president plunge the country further into never-ending political turmoil and eventual bloodshed. The struggles of the people of Malawi for a better nation have come a long way. Mutharika should be reminded that the patience of peace-loving Malawians is not unlimited, and it is possible to push him out of power as Kamuzu was.