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Sometimes in Parliament
One evening last July, I wobbled into the lounge of my house just after 19:00 hours. I was welcomed by a hush sombre mood from a battalion of my wards that was glued to the television set. No one talked or attempted to play pranks to disturb the attention the telly was receiving.
This was unusual in a house where people normally fight over which channel to watch at a particular time—making me feel guilty for failing to buy a dual decoder or the latest PVR craze in pay television services. By some unwritten pact, my clan seemed to have agreed to watch the movie that was showing the way it is supposed to be done: from beginning to the end without interruption.
The movie was titled Sometimes in April. When I enquired whether my wards understood what the movie depicted, one of them confidently said it was the tale of the ethnic conflict in Rwanda between the Hutus and the Tutsis. A baseless conflict or civil war in which thousands of innocent Hutus perished in 1994 in that tiny Central African country, just because they were born Hutus.
My son who is an undergraduate put it straight: “It is a depiction of the barbaric killings or desecration of the Hutu tribal group in Rwanda that shook the entire globe. Many people still do not believe that such deeds of sheer savagery could ever happen in mother Africa.”
Giving him my nod, I said from the bottom of my heart: “A similar thing happened in what you are told is beautiful Malawi. This so called ‘Warm heart of Africa’ can turn ugly and cruel.
The only difference with what you are watching is that here, instead of innocent, unsuspecting people being led to the slaughter house, they were thrown into various notorious detention camps and left there to rot at the pleasure of the Kamuzu Banda regime that ruled with total impunity and disregard for human rights. Those who were unfortunate are believed to have been thrown into the Shire River and savaged devoured by crocodiles.”
The silence and tension in the room heightened and deepened.
Watching the suffering, pain and anguish that a family of a Hutu army officer married to a Tutsi woman went through on account of the wife’s ethnic community, I recollected unsavoury political events that had just taken place in Parliament in Lilongwe.
I was flabbergasted to hear a report that a veteran politician—John Tembo—who should be leading others in Parliament by good example and helping younger legislators to behave appropriately and raise wise issues in the August House, had the temerity to suggest that the mandate of the National Compensation Tribunal (NCT) should not be renewed until government compensated the Malawi Congress Party for property lost during Operation Bwezani in 1993.
I wondered, and still do, whether anyone in his/her proper frame of mind could make such a lewd and inhumane proposal in Parliament. Could any sensible person equate the suffering of thousands of innocent lives persecuted by the MCP regime to property lost by an oppressive party due to its own cruel and senseless rule for three decades?
Could leadership of a major opposition party in what is perceived to be a democratic Parliament seriously afford to start scratching at the old but unhealed wounds of ex-detainees who were maimed during the egocentric rule of its own all-knowing and never erring Kamuzu?
And today I hear the never repentant MCP has added salt to the wounds by asking government to pay it K500 million as compensation for its once elegant headquarters in Lilongwe, which was left in ruins after the Army did justice to its rotten political system through Operation Bwezani.
Come to think of it: Who should be taken to task for government’s failure to compensate victims of the itchy and stinking Kamuzu rule of terror if not the MCP? Are MCP leaders so myopic that they have forgotten how the 1993 insurrection or people’s revolution against its cruelty was triggered by self-seeking Kamuzu loyalists in the form of members of the notorious Malawi Young Pioneers movement that killed a soldier in Mzuzu?
It is senseless for anyone to equate the suffering of thousands of Malawians who languished in horrid Kamuzu prisons to the loss of property such as the MCP’s former headquarters. That building could best be equated to the Nazi gas chambers as it was from there, sometimes, that fiendish plots to exterminate innocent people were hatched by the MCP.
Remember the scheme to round up Catholic Bishops and “urinate over them” discussed during an infamous MCP convention following the release of the Catholic Pastoral Letter that sent Kamuzu and his blind followers in a mad rage?
Like the Nazi gas chambers, the ruins of the MCP regime at City City are better forgotten and erased from people’s memory than revived as the present MCP leadership is insisting—at least, not using tax payers’ money.
I consider it a big shame that Parliament can tolerate egoistic people that are perpetually bent on ignoring the pain and agony of thousands of political victims of the MCP and allow them to have their own way in the present dispensation.
I don’t sing praises to fellow human beings, but in all fairness former president Bakili Muluzi and his administration were not wrong in hatching the idea of the NCT. They were, in my opinion and to put it point blank, not just seeking cheap popularity when they decided to set up the NCT but demonstrating to all and sundry that governments would always be held accountable for its mistakes while in power.
That Muluzi and company did not completely fulfil the objective of the programme should not give the MCP a new platform from which to advance the brand of politics it knows best: suppressing free voices and enjoying seeing the downtrodden masses in perpetual agony. This is what the MCP‘s present foolish demand for compensation amounts to.
History is awash with examples of cruel regimes that have had to pay heavily for their disregard of human dignity once there is inevitable change of power. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Germany were made to pay reparations to several countries that suffered economic and political ruin due to the madness which that leader wrought on the entire globe resulting in the Second World War. Japan too was punished heavily when America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 to shut it up.
Today, leaders who perpetrated the massacre of the Hutus in Rwanda are being made to account for the heartless and merciless slaughter of innocent lives at the United Nations sponsored tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania.
What gives the MCP the false confidence that it would for ever get away with its atrocities, which people were beginning to forgive through the NCT instituted by leaders who had a human face? Doesn’t the MCP realise it is now adding hot chilli to unhealed wounds?
It would be preposterous for the Bingu wa Mutharika administration to heed this madness from the MCP, even under the false pretext of honouring Kamuzu, an excuse the MCP is advancing to win sympathy.
All sensible legislators in Parliament should simply move fast and pass a bill to give the NCT a new lease of life and ignore the crocodile tears of people who thrive on the suffering of others and yet call themselves democrats.
It is a pity that Sometimes in Parliament, people introduce foolish and selfish motions that must be rejected and ejected out of the house by all right thinking democrats. Kamlepo Kalua was right when he said a hyena cannot change its nature simply by being moved from one type of habitation to another. The MCP has not changed.
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