President Lazarus Chakwera is a remarkable public speaker, a man well-endowed with indefinite eloquence that charms every ear that consumes his voice.President Chakwera addressing the nation for seven minutes to announce the reinstatement of General Vincent Nundwe
Definitely, if we had enough world and time, you would be forgiven for choosing to spend a lifetime enjoying Chakwera speaking—yes, a lifetime.
But we don’t have that time. As a people, we need to keep working to make our lives better. As a President, Chakwera needs to fix the economy and reorganize the politics through putting in place concrete step not just flowery speeches.
As Nyasa Times, we shudder to submit, here, that President Chakwera is going overboard in his appetite of always wanting to be updating Malawians on every slight step his government is taking.
We keep seeing the President giving weekly radio updates. We keep seeing the President giving timely social media updates. We keep seeing the President in various media houses—local and international giving updates from Malawi.
Is the President not updating enough?
We are not against the President decision to keep updating the nation on every step his government is taking. It’s part of being transparent and accountable to Malawians.
However, we feel the government machinery has adequate communication channels that do not require the President himself to be on the frontlines.
State House has a full department of communication, headed by Sean Kampondeni and, of course, we have a press secretary there, the busy Brian Banda, whose duty, among whatever he does there, is to keep the public informed of the President’s every move.
Beside State House, government has fully-fledged Ministry of Information, headed by Minister Gospel Kazako, a remarkable communicator.
Not only that, you have the office of the secretary to the Cabinet and Government, headed by quite an efficient communicator, Zangazanga Develious Chikhosi.
All these three organs are key in sending out government key decisions to the public and, so far, none has qualms with how they are working.
The issue of having President Chakwera running to the podium often to communicate his decisions is subjecting him to some kind of a talk-show host.
We believe the President should concentrate his appearance to State of Nation Address (SONA), monthly media appearances and answering questions in Parliament.
His regular, 5-minutes Nation Address appearances are beginning to presuppose that our President has little to do at the State House—as such, he wants to be seen to be busy. We don’t want our minds to project to that direction.
President Chakwera has a lot of things to do and, at this point, we expect results to speak for themselves—not him speaking them. We want Chakwera to run the nation and must not be Mr Talk-Talk.
