DARK DAY EULOGY

We better not post a thing. Our hearts bleed with pain for those who lost their lives on July 20 last year as we stood up against the foolishness of Bingu's executive arrogance. God has answered our prayers within a year and he has uprooted the devils from the leadership circles of our society.

United we stood and our brothers were sent to their graves earlier than per God's plan. May their souls rest in peace.

United we will always stand against any abuse of power by those we elect into high office.

God Bless Malawi, God bless our democracy

I MISSED THE DAY BUSHIRI PRAYED FOR MULUZI’S HEALING?

Bakili Elson Muluzi is no simple politician. He comes with many faces and he masks himself in them so well.

The first time I saw Muluzi in person was during my secondary school days at William Murray Secondary School. Two days before he visited the Nkhoma Mission, some delinquent chaps sat down at a tea-forum and debated on whether the President had more powers than any other human being.

To curtail the winding debate a way was devised to prove if Muluzi was just human as all of us. (This comes from a background that Muluzi’s predecessor, Kamuzu Banda, was treated as a semi-god and let’s face it, our presidents struggle to accept that they can fall sick. No wonder we hide their physical frailty)

We agreed that when the President visits our school, we should all line up to greet him. Not only that; we had to spit in our hands and rub gently. If Muluzi was going to shake all our hands without being suspicious then he was just human.

The day came. He came to our school and we lined up. We had not forgotten the rule so we spit as agreed. In his dark glasses, the President walked while smiling; greeting us and making jokes as well. “Kumalimbikira school eti” (Work hard in class okay?), he said when I squeezed my hand into his. It was threatening to look him straight in the eye but my salivated hand and his met diplomatically, and then he proceeded to the next saliva-greased hand.

Done deal, Muluzi is human.

That night we celebrated our assignment triumph with a dish of hard nsima and boiled meat (I am not sure if it had some drops of paraffin to control our libido)

It therefore did not come as a surprise when seven years ago I learnt that Bakili was struggling with his back. The first days he used to tell us that the back problem had come about because of his tight and long schedule in campaigning for Bingu to become President.

Ironically, it was the same Bingu who made Muluzi a hopeless patient as his discs kept falling apart due to repeated threats and arrests from the DPP government.

The court proceedings commenced for Muluzi to prove his innocence in the K1.7 billion case. The first court sessions drew huge crowds to the High Court but as time went by, people abandoned Muluzi such that his trips to court were ignorable even in a busy trading town of Limbe.  

Muluzi, the statesman, was really human. During court sessions his lawyers would always ask for 30-minute breaks for him to refresh and relax.     

Then during the Easter weekend this year, things changed suddenly. Muluzi’s discs came back in place and the pain was gone. He ably attended Bingu’s burial at Ndata and weeks later he went to Lesotho as an Election Observer.

Some days before his Lesotho trip he even had time to go on national TV to beg Blantyre residents to stop throwing sugarcane molasses on the streets (Of all things Mr. Muluzi? Seriously?)

Muluzi, the human, is really healed. Last week he also attended two functions in quick succession; The Independence prayers at COMESA Hall and the 100-Day Celebrations of the new government at Sports Complex.

Within the same period of time, the new Director of Public Prosecutions indicated that the configuration of Muluzi’s 7-year long case has changed so the prosecution team should go back to the drawing board.

Who really has healed Bakili Muluzi? Did I miss him visiting the famous young and charismatic prophet Shepherd Bushiri or Nigeria’s TB Joshua?

Did Bingu’s death heal Muluzi’s back? And if that’s the case, have funerals become medication of back problems?

Let it be said loudly and clearly that Muluzi has been using taxpayers’ money to visit his doctors in United Kingdom and South Africa all these years. And during the same period of time some poor Malawians have died due to lack of medical care that is only available outside the country.

Had Muluzi told the truth about his problem, some common person from Madetsa or Saimoni or Wajingo or Mzanya or Kamteketa villages would have been airlifted to South Africa or India for proper and genuine treatment.

If Muluzi is innocent, he must let the law take its due course. There is no need to aggravate bodily pain or always ask for an extension to the process of justice.

Now that he has asked for 6 months to recuperate and stand trial, nobody knows what will happen afterwards. Months will turn into years again.

One thing I know is that people who are innocent do not exploit the law. Take John Zenasi Ungapake Tembo for example; many Malawians used to say that he has blood in his hands but when he faced prosecution and got acquitted his image was cleared (somehow)

Muluzi is human. He can get sick and has all right to seek medical treatment using our taxes by virtue of being a Malawian and former head of state. But all this should not be done as a way of hindering the cases that are hanging over his head.

Your Excellency Dr. Bakili Muluzi, take heed.

NBS, NATIONAL BANK, INDE Bank, STANDARD BANK and MSB CANNOT BE TRUSTED

I have never of dreamt of being a banker at any point in my life but the etiquette synonymous with banking keeps me interested in the affairs therein.

Banking halls are places where you cannot fully understand the logic behind some of their way of doing things. Besides tying pens to dirty strings for their customers, banks are also full of one rude teller here and one tough-for-nothing security officer there. It seems they are worried with people answering phones in the banking halls instead of rectifying the laziness of their systems which sometimes keep customers waiting on the queue for hours just for a simple transaction.

I remember some years ago, some bank employed young and beautiful ladies to stand in the banking halls and smile to customers all day long. To make the innovation worse, these ladies were also assigned to guide customers to some place where a water dispenser and a bottle of orange squash were placed. It proved a bad idea because both the ladies and the squash disappeared within few months.

The point I am trying to drive home is that, banks seem so busy to innovate irrelevant procedures when all we need is an efficient, reliable and fast service. 

If you have checked inquisitively, you will realize that all banks seem the same. They just differ here and there on interest rates and some (hidden) costs. Almost all of them are now buying vans to reach rural masses (so they say). Why not sort out the mess for more enlightened people in urban areas before you take your trash to illiterate citizens who do not have the chance to understand some complex and abusive banking mistakes?

Having said all this, banking should be guided by ethics and those ethics should be treated as divine law. Don’t be rude to me just because I want to access my account and keep my personal information secret enough because I am your client.

Did I just say “keep my information secret?”

Ask NBS, National Bank, Inde Bank, Standard Bank and Malawi Savings Bank. These are the very institutions which broke their own ethics when it comes to keeping secrets of their clients,

Nobody seems to care that these banks cannot be trusted; or let’s say their systems are flawed when it comes to issues of confidentiality.

What really happened for people to know that Malawi Revenue Authority (MRA) had borrowed money from these commercial banks to complement government’s zero deficit budget? (Never mind the reasons behind such a move)

World over, banks operate like doctor and patient. The information between them is privileged. The moment a doctor discloses information about his or her patient, he or she has broken ethics of secrecy and privacy. This is the reason after postmortems; doctors insist that information should only be disclosed by relatives unless the postmortem is in the public interest. This is also true for hotels and their clients. Lawyers are not an exception.

The transactions between MRA and the banks were in the same framework of a bank-customer relationship. Disclosure of the transaction should only be done only after the consent of the two parties. For any party to disclose information related to the transaction is breach of trust and unethical.

And then what happens to the relationship between bankers and their customers. Good as the revelation is that money was borrowed from banks, but the one who tipped Mnesa, obviously from one of the banks, has destroyed the privacy that is supposed to exist between customer and bank.

Are we wrong to speculate that the main suspect who leaked the information is one woman who is close to Mnesa and works for this blue-branded bank? She must have been the one who solicited the information for Mnesa. Where does the boundary between ethical issues and personal interests drawn?

This is an issue that the ethical committee of the Bankers Association of Malawi needs to deal with, lest the banks lose their integrity as a result of members of staff who are prepared to throw ethics to the wind for purposes of expediency.

Forget about MRA, Ken Lipenga, his lies and him being shielded. Let us focus on the integrity of our banks. Are we safe as clients? What if this malpractice also happens not to a big client like MRA but individuals or common people?

These four banks should find out who leaked confidential information into the path of George Mnesa. And they have to deal with this issue accordingly to restore their trust.  

This is just food for thought.