BLANTYRE--Sacked Inspector General of Police Peter Mukhito said he isn’t bitter with his sacking.

Speaking in a first media interview since his sacking on April 9, Mukhito said he was ready for anything.

"I know once you are appointed to do a job the next is exit," he told MaraPost in an exclusive interview. "So you are talking to someone who was already prepared."

Mukhito became the first victim of the change of guard in State House following the death from cardiac arrest of Pres Bingu wa Mutharika alongside the loquacious Information Minister Patricia Kaliati. He has since been replaced by career policeman Loti Dzonzi.

Following his sacking there were rumours that he had shot himself. Mukhito laughed off these suggestions.

"I heard that as well but why should I kill myself?" he said.

No reason was given for the police chief's sacking but insiders say there was no way new President Joyce Banda could work with Mukhito. In November 2010, a bodyguard warned then Vice President Banda not to use her official MG 2 vehicle.

"I was coming from the airport after welcoming the President, who was coming from Botswana, when my personal security guard asked me not to use the Mercedes Benz I used on my way to the airport," President Banda recalled in an earlier interview. "He insisted that I use a different car. I then obliged. Just after 15 minutes my official car - the Mercedes Benz that I did not use - was involved in a mysterious accident where it was hit by a truck full of maize; later believed to be a police truck. I requested the President to institute an investigation or furnish me with the Police Report. But up to this day, I have not been informed of anything."

The former inspector general of police first gained notoriety last year when he questioned a lecturer over comparisons he made between the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and the fuel crisis in Malawi.
The row eventually led to the closure of the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College. Despite this his boss, Pres Mutharika dubbed him "the best IG ever".

On his watch last July police killed at least 20 people during the unprecedented anti-government protests over the worsening economy. Mukhito was also fingered in the mysterious death of a fourth-year Polytechnic student.

And after a 25-year-old student activist Robert Chasowa was found dead on a college pavement, Mukhito said the victim had killed himself and claimed that he had left two 'suicide' notes. A pathologist, however, contradicted him, saying Chasowa was bludgeoned to death.

"As a mother, I know how painful it must be for my fellow woman (Robert's mother)," President Banda said when she announced the setting up of the commission of inquiry to probe Chasowa's mysterious death. "This is why this commission has been set up to know what killed him and why he was killed."

Last October Mutharika told the BBC he would set up an inquiry to probe the student's death "within days" but until the president’s death on April 5 no such inquiry was in place.
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©2012 The Maravi Post. Reproduction authorised, with usual acknowledgment