First Lady to launch Shaping our Future Foundation
First Lady Madame Monica Chakwera will launch her foundation known as Shaping our Future Foundation on Friday Octover 2 2020, State House has confirmed.
Madam Chakwera’s foundation will focus on uplifting people’s livelihoods.
“I will focus on uplifting the lives of vulnerable people in the rural areas of Malawi, especially the girl child,” she said.
Over the past decades—especially when wives of the presidents, trading as First Ladies, started to appear on the scene in 1994—there has been debate regarding their role in shaping and influencing their husband’s style of governance.
Of course, there wasn’t much talk when Malawi’s first, First Lady, Annie Muluzi, and her subsequent, Patricia Shanil Muluzi, were at the State House.
They both managed the Freedom Foundation Trust.
It must be underlined that the two kept quite a low profile figure—always shying away from being on the frontlines.
In fact, even when Bingu wa Mutharika’s first wife, Ethel, occupied the State House until her demise in 2007, her display—just like the previous two, was more motherly, choosing the background than being on the frontlines.
However, much of the public interest in the role of First Ladies in shaping and influencing their spouses’ style of governance hit the spotlight when Callista Chimombo married Bingu wa Mutharika in 2012.
For the first time in the history of First Ladies, Malawians were shocked to see a First Lady go wild spitting vitriol in public, attacking anyone deemed to be political agitators of the Head of State. Callista even called the civil society organisations to ‘go to hell.”
Further, Malawians started reading headlines about huge sum of money from State agencies being channeled to finance unexplained charities ventures run by First Ladies.
With Callista, the office of the First Lady had taken a wrong turn.
The coming in of Getrude Maseko, former President Peter Mutharika’s wife, didn’t helped matters at all. In fact, it only deepened the calls for Malawi to consider regulating the office of the First Lady.
Unlike the loud Callista, Gertrude was quite. However, through her Beautify Malawi initiative, tongues wagged regarding alleged billions coming to her fold—all unaccounted for.
She also made headlines for becoming an overnight billionaire, with a strange accumulation of several unexplained properties in the country, yet she doesn’t have a job.
Arguably, Callista and Getrude have transformed the office of the First Lady from that motherly perception, as displayed by the first three First Ladies, to an avenue of political arrogance, corruption and primitive accumulation.
This is the office that Madame Monica Chakwera inherits. She has inherited an office with a complete damaged reputation.
Madam Chakwera, an auditor by profession, is a low key woman.
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It is wrong to claim that the so called three First Ladies where quite as we do know that it was through the same Foundations that Patricia Shanil (Muluzi) got an honorary degree from the University in Malawi. She was vocal neither was Ethel Mutharika. What would be helpful whenever some is authoring an article for public consumption to really dig deeper than these biased approaches to to reporting.