Chizuma intimidates ACB whistle-blower through personal phone call

The 44-UTM vehicles whistle-blower Gosten Chinseu has raised concerns that he is living in fear and feels intimidated after the Anti-Corruption Bureau Director General Martha Chizuma recently phoned to warn him against going to the media on issues to do with the Bureau.

Two weeks ago, Chinseu disclosed to the Weekend Nation that the ACB has lost a query statement which he submitted asking the Bureau to investigate how the said UTM vehicles were purchased. However, the Bureau later said that the document has been found and that it was not missing but only misplaced by one of the officers.

In an interview, Chinseu disclosed that the ACB Director General personally phoned him to express her disappointment for the information he disclosed to the media.

Director General Martha Chizuma

“Personally, regardless of what she said during the phone call, I really feel intimidated and threatened especially considering that soon after I filed the query, I also got a lot of threat through phone calls from UTM cadres. The phone call with the ACB director lasted exactly 12 minutes 38 seconds and was the longest call of my life,” said Chinseu.

He said up to now he has no idea why Chizuma had to make a personal phone call to him, instead of leaving the matters to her officers who have been dealing with him all along.

“To me the call was not in good faith. All she said was that when I have issues, I should be talking to her directly a suggestion which I find weird considering her position,” he added.

Chinseu, a concerned citizen, filed the complaint at ACB, asking the bureau to launch a probe into the the 44 vehicles allegedly donated by a UTM sympathiser. It later transpired that the vehicles were bought by one Khwesi Msusa a close friend of Chilima.

In the query statement, Chinseu argued that UTM’s accumulation of assets and resources need to be scrutinized more so because the party has no defined source of income and does not receive funding from Parliament after failing to get the required 10 per cent threshold of Members of Parliament to qualify for the funding provision. UTM has only four MPs in the August House.

After the submission of Chinseu’s query, Chizuma confirmed receipt with query and disclosed that the Bureau had received two queries on the UTM vehicles. Chinseu told the Weekend Nation that he was surprised when he was told to go and make a fresh submission at the bureau. He said the ACB officer who informed him about the fresh statement said the previous original statement as well as its duplicate could not be traced at the Bureau.

Following revelations of the missing document, there has been pressure on Chizuma to resign for her incompetency and lack of decisive actions on various cases which the Bureau is handling.

Social commentator and activist Humphrey Mvula said despite that President Lazarus Chakwera is doing enough to fight corruption, the efforts are being frustrated by the Director General who is more of talking on social media while doing nothing to support the Head of State.

Mvula gave the missing of the document as an example of how the leadership of the Bureau is failing to manage its affairs.

Since he took up the position as the Director General of the ACB, Chizuma has been embodied in a number of scandals including when he was caught in a phone conversation discussing some operational details of the Bureau.

Again, two months ago the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) Dr Steven Kayuni, in a letter to Chizuma, admonished the head of the graft bursting body describing her approach to investigations as an embarrassment and disappointment to other law enforcement agencies in the country. The letter exposed Chizuma’s incompetence and self-centredness as the DPP observed that on some cases she opts to operate on her own while side lining other law enforcement agencies.

In a recent News Talk phone-in program on Capital Radio, Malawians rated Chizuma poorly as ACB DG with 90% of them feeling that she has failed and demanding that she should leave the Bureau by either resigning or fired.

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