Malawians can now take hard look at MCP: Editorial
]They came from all corners of Malawi with a singular aim of releasing Malawi Congress Party (MCP) from the strong vice grip of one-man’s dictatorship in the name of John Zenus Ungapake Tembo.
And the MCP convention delegates, converging at Natural Resources College in Lilongwe, delivered just that.
In one unison chorus shout, they refused the advances of a puppet master and rejected the Machiavellian machinations and whimsical desires of Tembo after he shamelessly attempted to extend his grip and rule against the party’s constitution which expressly bars him after failing to lead MCP to the State House twice in 2004 and 2009.
Instead they then chose progress and freshness and with a stroke of a pen (or is it a vote?), they transferred the sceptre and mantle of MCP leadership into the hands of a hitherto political novice answering to the name of Lazarus Chakwera.
We, at Nyasa Times, would like to heartily congratulate the reverend for the honour the MCP rank and file has bestowed on him. This is not because we believe he is the panacea incarnate to all the problems confronting our poor nation of Malawi. This should also not be construed by the over fertile minds working overtime as our endorsement of his candidature next year.
Rather, our words of best wishes merely stem from our fervent belief that the ascension of Chakwera to the MCP presidency offers the party a clean break from its chequered and dark past of 31 years of entrenched dictatorship, thereby affording Malawians a chance of taking a second hard look at it as they get ready to exercise their democratic right to choose who is to govern them after May next year. Chakwera is a game changer.
As for Tembo, we refuse to frog a dead horse but a few words are enough to him and his ilk in Malawi politics: Malawians do embarrassingly retire politicians who overstay their welcome and become a nuisance and an unnecessary clogging impediment to their progress.
The wise say enough upon realising they have nothing left in their tank. Posterity and history will judge Tembo’s legacy and situate him where he truly belongs in the great scheme of things.
For us, though, we can only celebrate that MCP will now have a chance to move on as Tembo was the last of the vestiges representing that rather dark past.
As a sum up, we can only join in the chorus of the now clichéd expression that democracy has won at the MCP convention in Lilongwe.
With MCP’s Chakwera, PP’s Joyce Banda, DPP’s Peter Mutharika and UDF’s Atupele Muluzi, the field for the presidency is exceptionally strong and the political landscape is irreversibly sharper.
We expect nothing but the best from each of the candidates to raise their game and demonstrate to Malawians that they have a better strategic plan to take the country out of the excruciating jaws of debilitating poverty that has troubled our people since time immemorial and propel them to a new era of prosperity for all and not just the chosen elite few.
We can say the die is cast, bring it on and let the democratic times roll.
