Chithyola Banda’s shadow show: MCP plays at government-in-waiting

The Malawi Congress Party has  announced a shadow cabinet, complete with a Leader of the Opposition, shadow ministers and — should anyone doubt the seriousness of the enterprise — deputy shadow ministers besides.

Simplex Chithyola Banda takes the top job, leading the party’s parliamentary team, while Nancy Tembo, a former Cabinet minister who presumably knows rather better than most what the real job entails, has been handed Foreign Affairs.

Sam Kawale gets Agriculture, Edward Chileka Banda gets Education, Richard Chimwendo Banda takes Local Government, and Moses Kunkuyu is given Information — a portfolio that, in opposition, tends to mean rather a lot of press releases and rather less actual information.

The exercise is, of course, entirely sensible in principle. A shadow cabinet forces an opposition to do its homework: to have a foreign policy rather than merely objections to someone else’s, to have a view on agriculture beyond criticising the minister’s harvest figures.

It lends the whole business of opposition a discipline that mere heckling from the backbenches does not.

Whether it will achieve any of that in practice is another matter. Shadow cabinets are, in the best of circumstances, only as good as the scrutiny they actually produce — and Malawi’s Parliament, like most, offers ample opportunity for shadow ministers to hold press conferences and considerably less to force real concessions from government.

There is a difference between naming a government-in-waiting and behaving like one.
Still, credit where it’s due. The MCP has at least grasped that opposition is a job, not merely a mood — and that voters, given the choice, tend to prefer alternatives who look as though they have thought about what they would do, rather than simply what they are against.

Whether this shadow cabinet amounts to more than an elaborate list of names remains, entirely predictably, to be seen.