……DAY 13 OF NATIONAL MOURNING: Remembering SKC’s Shrewdness
By Sean Kampondeni
This is probably the most difficult attribute of Saulos Klaus Chilima to talk about, partly because some people regard shrewdness as a vice rather than a virtue and also partly because this is an attritube that SKC preferred to operate in silence.
But my own conviction is that shrewdness is indispensable to leadership, if the messianic admonition for us to “be as shrewd as serpents and as harmless as doves” is anything to go by, signifying that whether any leader’s shrewdness is a virtue or vice depends on the causes and ends for which they use it.
So we cannot truly understand the depth of SKC’s leadership acumen without reflecting on the shrewdness he skillfully and silently used to navigate the competing and contradicting interests at play in the complicated political terrain of Malawi where religious, traditional, corporate, institutional, business, community, civil society, media, tribal, and diplomatic leaders all clandestinely push some political agenda that advances their parochial interests.
I reflected on this the last time I saw SKC, which was on Wednesday, May 22nd, a happy occasion by all measures.
We had just finished a meeting at Kamuzu Palace, and as we were walking out, he asked me to accompany him to Kumbali Lodge for a reception in honour of Prime Minister Benediktsson of Iceland.
He said, “Chief, I am representing the President at this reception, and I’d love for you to come. And if you don’t mind, you can add your car to my convoy so that we go together and enjoy a good meal after the difficult discussions you and I have been having.” I accepted this rare honour to join his motorcade, and off we went.
The difficult discussions he was referring to had taken place in his study at home just six days prior.
During that conversation, he had expressed his anxiety about the radicals in both MCP and UTM, whom he feared would oppose what he was planning to do in the 2025 elections, namely to be the person in charge of President Chakwera’s 2025 re-election campaign.
He made it clear to me that day that he knew which radical loyalists in both parties would not easily accept this proposition, but he said his mind was quite made up about it, though he wasn’t sure how to align those loyalists to his intentions, and so he asked me to advise on this aspect, for as he put it, “I need clear heads for this.”
I empathized with his predicament. After all, he was, in my estimation, the most viable presidential hopeful of my generation, and so it was understandable that he did not want to let his followers down by giving them the impression that he was giving up on the presidency, which he certainly wasn’t.
So he wanted to know my thoughts on how to stagger his own presidential bid in order to support the President’s bid for re-election in 2025 without altogether giving his followers the discouraging impression that he was giving up on the dream of a Chilima Presidency.
I asked him to give me time to develop a strategy for doing this shrewdly, and so he gave me one month to develop a skeletal road map and told me the name of the person in his office I’d work with to flesh it out upon his return from South Korea, not knowing that once back from Asia he would not live long enough to finalize that strategy or execute it.
I do not claim that I know whether he was going to go through with this idea, but from that final conversation, I could see that at best he was in two minds about the 2025 presidential elections, due to a complex web of factors, and that he felt that until he was ready to announce what he’d decided, the politically shrewd thing to do was to publicly remain silent about his ambivalence and to keep those who supported either side of his two minds from seeing the other side lest they lose interest in staying engaged in the political process.
In fact, how different people have perceived his death may be understood as being shaped by whichever of SKC’s two minds they were privy to or vested in.
As a result, some of the acrimony felt by some people in the wake of his death likely stems from the fact that he never had a chance to state publicly whether or not he was going to run for President in 2025.
But that last conversation with him taught me that he knew that whichever one of the two minds he was in ended up being pronounced by him to the public would cause controversies and disillusionment in the political landscape, hence the need for “clear heads” to develop shrewd strategies for minimizing the losses and fallout among the most radical MCP and UTM loyalists.
He was keen to be shrewd in his approach to this problem because he knew from the practical experience of running for office on three presidential tickets of three different political parties, of which two had succeeded and one had failed, that it is always the radical party loyalists, or “hot heads” as he called them, that make any nuanced political decisions and alliances in an election year hard to make, harder to explain, and harder still to rally support for.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are those of the author not necessarily of Th Maravi Post or Editor
