Synod drags DPP’s Wa Jeffrey to court over careless remarks: ‘North Malawi will never produce a President until Jesus comes back’

Secretary General (SG) of the governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Greselder Jeffrey wa Jeffrey is being sued by Livingstonia Synod’s Church and Society programme over her careless, unfortunate, discriminatory remarks that the Northern Region will never produce a president to rule the country.

Church and Society executive director Moses Mkandawire said private practice lawyers are working on the matter to put Wa Jeffrey in the dock over the remarks.

“Such remarks have a potential to bring about tribal war s was the case in Rwanda and other countries,” said Mkandawire.

But Wa Jeffrey recently told Capital FM that she only made a declaration that Alliance for Democracy (Afford) leadership cannot win the presidency in 2019.

She said her remarks at a political rally in Karonga were blown out of proportion.

Several DPP top ranking officials including George Chaponda and Jappie Mhango ar eon record to have made similar remarks.

Commentators argue that former president Bakili Muluzi said the same to justify why he had bypassed all his senior colleagues in the United Democratic Front (UDF) on his succession and settled for Bingu wa Mutharika as presidential candidate.

Now UDF is in political union with DPP. According to UDF-DPP unwritten policy only the Southern Region can and should produce a Malawi president.

And newspaper columnist Lezi Zeleza Manda had a satire on the matter.

“Northerners should actually blame themselves for undermining themselves politically and being overzealous. It was Ziliro Chibambo, a senior northern politician, who first declared that the North would never produce a president until Jesus, the Christ came back. Northerners did not cry foul then. Then, it was King M’mbelwa who declared Mutharika (ka)Ngwazi but the Northerners never condemned him.  Some people say that it was also northerners that declared Kamuzu Banda life president of the Malawi Congress Party,” he wrote in Weekend Nation.

He pointed out that the DPP secretary general was  just repeating her party’s policy, that’s why she did not get censured by her party.