Blantyre’s water board turns to Mutharika as staff-management war deepens

Employees at Blantyre Water Board have asked President Peter Mutharika to sack both the utility’s chief executive, Yeremiah Chihana, and its board chairman, Stanley Chirwa, in a bid to end a leadership standoff that staff say is crippling operations.

Under the banner of the BWB Employees Trade Union, workers passed the resolution at a meeting at the utility’s Blantyre head office, where union secretary general Davie Maluwa said the goal was simply to “save the institution.”

The union had already tried, and failed, to get the government’s Comptroller of Statutory Corporations to step in back in May; officials there said their hands were tied while the matter remained before the courts.

The dispute has an unmistakably farcical edge: staff spent more than three hours at head office praying for the utility’s future and playing music over loudspeakers.

Behind the theatre lies a genuinely tangled legal fight. Chihana was suspended for a second time in five months last week, this time over allegations of misrepresentation, unauthorised appointments and a K500 million overdraft allegedly secured without board approval.

As with his first suspension, the High Court promptly ordered his reinstatement, with the judge also granting him leave to challenge the board’s decision through judicial review.

Governance analysts Benedicto Kondowe and Willy Kambwandira have warned that the merry-go-round of suspension and reinstatement is doing real damage, cautioning that prolonged leadership uncertainty risks undermining the water board’s basic job: keeping the taps running.