By Ntata Stinger:
There is a constitutional question Malawi should not allow to disappear beneath political explanations about fuel, El Niño or Government finances: Who postponed Parliament?
President Arthur Peter Mutharika wrote to the Speaker directing that the Fourth Meeting of the 52nd Session of Parliament be postponed until the next Budget Meeting. But Section 59(1) does not appear to give the President a unilateral power to postpone the commencement of a meeting of Parliament.
The Constitution provides that a meeting commences at such time as “the Speaker, in consultation with the President, may appoint”.
The Speaker was apparently not consulted. He learnt of the postponement through the President’s communication and subsequently aligned his own announcement accordingly.
If that account is correct, we have a serious problem. Because without the constitutionally required participation of the Speaker, what legal act postponed Parliament?
The President’s letter?
Where does Section 59 give him that unilateral power?
The Speaker’s subsequent announcement?
If that announcement merely implemented a presidential decision already made without him, where was the constitutionally required consultation?
These are not technicalities. There should have been no postponement without consultation with the Speaker. The Constitution did not require the President merely to notify the Speaker. It did not require the Speaker merely to announce what the President had decided. And it certainly did not make the Speaker responsible for completing the “necessary formalities” after the substantive decision had already been taken.
It required constitutional participation BEFORE the decision.
That matters because Parliament is not an administrative department of the Presidency. It is the institution constitutionally charged, among other things, with scrutinising the Executive and authorising the expenditure of public money. If the Executive can unilaterally determine when Parliament will not meet, particularly when Parliament is expected to scrutinise that same Executive, the constitutional separation between the two institutions becomes dangerously thin.
The reasons given for postponement do not answer this problem.
Perhaps the fuel crisis is grave. Perhaps El Niño requires extraordinary expenditure. Perhaps Government genuinely believes postponing Parliament saves necessary resources.
All of that may be true. But a good reason does not create a constitutional power.
If the Constitution requires consultation with the Speaker, then consult the Speaker. If he agrees, postpone Parliament constitutionally. If he does not, the President cannot manufacture the missing power by writing a letter saying: “I direct.”
And presidential immunity does not change that. The President may enjoy constitutional protection from being personally sued while in office. His unconstitutional decisions do not thereby become constitutional. The Presidency remains subject to orders of the courts concerning constitutional rights and duties.
So perhaps the most important question arising from this episode is no longer whether the postponement was politically wise. It is whether, constitutionally, Parliament has been postponed at all. Because if the Speaker was never consulted, someone should explain what provision of the Constitution gave the President acting alone the power to send Parliament home.
This is precisely why Governance Reset matters. We cannot continue with a constitutional culture in which political power acts first and constitutional institutions are expected to regularise the position afterwards. The Constitution is not paperwork to be completed after power has acted. It is what determines whether power may act in the first place.
And on this one, the question is painfully simple:
No consultation. No constitutional process. So who postponed Parliament?
THE MACHINE IS BROKEN. RESET IT.
