Vice President Michael Usi grew a conscience too late to save the nation – and himself.
In 2009, James Washington, an American serving 15 years for attempted second-degree murder, thought his time had come after suffering a massive heart attack. In the spirit of ‘you can’t take secrets to the grave’, he confessed to a 2006 murder that had gone unsolved for years.
Then, with impeccable bad timing, his heart decided to start beating again. Unfortunately for him, the justice system doesn’t have an ‘undo button’ for murder confessions.
Washington went into the prison as a would-be killer and walked out with a fresh 45-year sentence — courtesy of his own mouth.
Fast forward to Malawi’s political circus. Vice President Michael Usi appears to be having his own Washington moment — minus the cardiac drama.
He has taken to hollering from the rooftops that the MCP government is packed with thieves. Of course, this revelation carries all the shock value of announcing that Lake Malawi contains water.
Enter Jessie Kabwila, the MCP publicity secretary, who responded with a threat of arrest, along with the tantalising hint that she has a dossier of Usi’s skeletons.
And here’s where hypocrisy sprints past comedy and collapses into farce: Kabwila has allegedly been sitting on this intel for months — years even — while dutifully smiling for the cameras.
We have been here before — a chilling echo of the MCP’s dark days, when the party, blind to its own reflection and deaf to the winds of change sweeping across the continent, threatened Catholic bishops with death for daring to challenge the system in 1992.
Usi, meanwhile, has spent over a year as vice president (and years before that as a minister) sipping tea with the same crooks he now denounces.
If these thieves are as bold as he claims, they must have been sweeping the Treasury bare in broad daylight while he was too busy kneading dough for mandazi, perfecting his Mr Bean routines and playing the ever-smiling clown-in-chief to the commander-in-chief’s stone-faced act.
His highlights as a vice president make for some sobering reading (and if you have tears, prepare to shed them now). Knead mandazi here. Throw a dance there. Buy bonya on Tuesday. Eat gado on Wednesday. Clown for the cameras on Thursday.
Threaten a hapless health worker in Chikwawa on Friday for daring to arrive late. All this while parading around with enough heavily armed bodyguards (and a convoy to match) to start a small war — if that isn’t legalised theft of public resources, then perhaps I’ve been misusing the word ‘theft’ my whole life.
Kabwila is hardly an innocent in this drama. She now claims to hold the moral high ground with her ‘secret file’ on Usi, yet has kept the public in the dark for years.
If she truly had evidence of misconduct, why didn’t she speak up earlier and save the country a fortune in lost funds? Timing, it seems, is everything — and in Malawian politics, timing is usually dictated by campaign schedules rather than any urgent sense of justice.
Now the two are locked in a bizarre contest I can only describe as the ‘Confessional Olympics’.
They’re sprinting to see who can hurl the most damaging revelations into the public square, all while conveniently ignoring the fact that their outrage has the shelf life of a campaign season.
One might almost admire their stamina if it weren’t for the sheer cynicism of the whole exercise.
At least James Washington had a near-death experience as an excuse for his big reveal. Usi and Kabwila have no such defence. Their sudden honesty is less a moral awakening and more like two seasoned grave diggers finally pointing out the bodies.
And that’s the real tragedy of Malawian politics: everyone knows where the skeletons are, but the whistle only gets blown when there’s political mileage to be gained. Until then, the thieves keep looting, the jesters keep dancing and the public keeps paying — sometimes in cash, always in dignity.
