Malata, Namiwa and the First Lady: deflection settles nothing

There is something almost admirable about the audacity of Billy Malata’s counter-attack. Rather than defending the First Lady’s BEAM Trust on the merits — its accounts, its governance, its record of disbursing donations — Malata has instead turned the question back on its chief accuser, demanding that Sylvester Namiwa’s Centre for Democracy and Economic Development Initiatives (CDEDI) open its own books first.

It is, in its way, a classic piece of Malawian political jiujitsu: when scrutiny becomes inconvenient, redirect it. Namiwa has spent recent days pressing for greater accountability at BEAM Trust, the charity associated with First Lady Gertrude Mutharika, amid mounting questions over its finances.

Malata’s response is not to dispute those questions so much as to declare them illegitimate coming from an organisation he suggests has never demonstrated its own transparency.

He wants to know whether CDEDI maintains proper bank accounts, pays its taxes to the Malawi Revenue Authority, remits PAYE for its staff, and reports to a board — the standard furniture of institutional propriety that campaigning bodies are so fond of demanding of others.

There is a reasonable point buried in here, even if it arrives wrapped in whataboutery: watchdogs ought to be able to withstand the same scrutiny they apply to their targets.

Malata’s broader argument — that a registered charity should not be presumed guilty simply because of its proximity to power, and that receiving donations is not itself an offence — is not unreasonable as a general principle.

Organisations, he says, should be judged on governance and compliance with the law, not on the political company they keep.

“If we want to fight Gertrude Mutharika politically, let us fight her directly and not attack BEAM,” he said, which is either a plea for fairness or a rather elegant piece of misdirection, depending on one’s priors.

But principle and pretext are not always easy to separate in Malawian public life, and it is difficult to ignore that this defence of BEAM’s institutional integrity has arrived precisely when questions about its finances have become most pointed.

Whether Malata’s challenge to CDEDI amounts to a genuine call for consistency or simply a convenient deflection is, ultimately, a matter for readers to judge — though one suspects the charity’s actual bank statements would settle the argument rather more efficiently than either side’s statements to the press.