The Maravi Post

It seems the former ruling UDF is working too hard to banish itself to the annals of history. It seems nowadays everything the party does is aimed at self-destruction.

Its downward spiral begun when it thought there was no one in the party that could lead it apart from one Bakili Muluzi knowing too well that laws barred the former president from ruling the country beyond two five-year terms. Key senior leaders left in the wake of this madness.

When Muluzi's third/open term project failed the party didn’t take this as a chance to heal itself. Instead it brought within its ranks a Trojan horse in the name of Bingu wa Mutharika who used it to walk into State House and elope with a new party leaving the UDF with egg all over its face.

But the party wasn’t done in its self-destruction mode. Against voices of reason leaders of the party decided to resurrect the Muluzi presidency again. What happened next was disaster: the party went to the 2009 polls without a candidate, its marriage of convenience with its erstwhile arch-enemy, the MCP, couldn’t help matters.

One would ordinarily think the perfectly sane men and women that run the party would learn from all these telling mistakes. But, hell no; when Muluzi left the scene in December 2009 the party couldn’t agree who should lead it. Two factions emerged fighting for what little remained of the party.

After the death of Bingu, whose decision to short-change the party of the presidency nearly killed it, the UDF decided to go to bed with the new lords and ladies in town. Some of us thought the party could now salvage its former glory by cutting some deal with the Peoples Party administration for some form of electoral alliance in the 2014 elections.

But, no; the party's suicide mission was not shelved. Out of the blues leaders of the party woke up from the wrong side of the bed one day and decided to order the party out of government just like that. The reasons of pulling out of government were devoid of any reason at all.

I wish our laws were empowered to make the UDF's slow death less painful. I wish the Registrar of Political Parties had powers that if the degree of confusion in a political party has reached schizophrenic levels a party must be de-registered to avoid wasting everybody's time. Surely the UDF's self-immolation is unstoppable.
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©2012 The Maravi Post.

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