Malawi Congress Party (MCP) has emerged from its cocoon. Its head honchos have said in black-and-white that the party will field President Lazarus Chakwera as its candidate in the 2025 Malawi Presidential elections. Without any sense of doubt, this means delegates at the party’s forthcoming convention will only rubber-stamp the incumbent.

You would be a fool to think these declarations don’t have a blessing of the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC), on which Chakwera sits.

Nonetheless, what Speaker Catherine Gotani Hara and her MCP colleagues have done by endorsing Chakwera remains divisive.

On one end, there are people on social media who believe MCPs’ decision to start flying Chakwera as the party’s 2025 candidate as early as 2022 is retrogressive. This group believes the move by MCP will draw Chakwera’s attention away from developing the country. All this despite the undisputed fact that Chakwera is yet to deliver on both, key and basic even those imagined promises he made in 2020 – that he would steer the country straight to Canaan; away from Singapore where President Peter Mutharika was juggling to land Malawi.

There is no denying that Chakwera would have secured an automatic second term landslide victory if he walked even a mile of his 2019 and 2020 talk. This, however, is a topic for debate on another day.

Now that we are in Baghdad, would Malawi end up in that promised land if MCP doesn’t declare Chakwera as its torchbearer 3 years before the elections? I honestly doubt he has a magic wand to turn things around.

So, does it really matter or surprise you that Julius Caesar has his name put forward by a gang of his Mark Antonies as MCP’s 2025 presidential candidate?

Mwina!

Even before end of two years into his first term, and with most of his election promises proving difficult to fulfill and corruption getting worse under his administration, the party of Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera has started a campaign for his re-election in 2025… pic.twitter.com/MYYUjtjGx3

— Idriss A. Nassah (@mynassah) May 10, 2022

I think that there is too much talk of 2025 among our politicians. The focus has shifted to the elections already and we're in campaign mode. Who will deal with the present? Who will focus on the problems we currently face?

— Onjezani Kenani (@onjezani) May 9, 2022

Tonse Alliance Agreement will be made public – Chilima

There is also another group that is faulting MCP’s approach on the basis of a mystery 2020 electoral agreement between MCP/Chakwera and UTM/Chilima. It is widely speculated, on the basis of what Chilima said then at Njamba Freedom Park, that MCP and UTM agreed to rotate the presidency between himself and his current boss.

In principle, and if such an agreement does indeed exist, it pins Chilima as an automatic presidential candidate for 2025 with the incumbent as his running mate. May be Chilima is banking and barking on this when he told some media outlets that Tonse Alliance agreement will be made public when the time is right.

With that in mind, this school considers recent declarations by MCP, albeit being unofficial, a deal breaker. But this can only be a valid argument if both MCP and UTM or Chakwera and Chilima were to retain this electoral pact of the Tonse Alliance come 2025. Yet, no political party or candidate can be forced to retain its seat within any alliance if such an alliance does not align with that party’s plans. This is why when Joyce Banda and PP saw that Chilima ignored what was agreed for a PP/UTM electoral alliance, she quickly jumped ship and endorsed Chakwera – making PP/UTM one of the shortest electoral alliances in Malawi’s history.

They say Karma is a bum. What Chilima did to Joyce Banda has moved full circle to serve him breakfast.

We also have to consider the fact that Tonse is not a political party – as if that would matter.

This school also believes Chilima is dying to remain in this alliance despite the common knowledge that Tonse Alliance (read MCP and Chakwera) is increasingly becoming unpopular. Unless you are living in some caves somewhere in Mulanje Mountain, the support this regime once commanded is lost. Who in their right mind would therefore want to remain in such an Alliance that has failed and continue to lie to Malawians? I could be wrong, but Tonse is like a ticket to losing an election, at par with DPP in 2020. So who would want to stand on Tonse Alliance ticket? May be Chilima. If he is not as smart as some people make him to be.

I digressed.

MCP is the best party in Malawi- Chakwera

I am of the opinion that with these proclamations, MCP is already on the runway. Everything is set for lift off – without UTM, Chilima and Tonse Alliance. To MCP, Chilima is as dead as Mgwirizano Coalition.

Tonse was an Alliance for 2020. 2025, argues the party, requires re-strategising.

Understandably, MCP has been attacked from all sides for its current approach. But I choose to disagree with either the attacking or the reasons given by the attackers. I am of the opinion that there is nothing wrong or surprising with Chakwera being nominated by his own sons and daughters within MCP at this hour. The party is setting a tone for its prospective alliance partners (including Chilima and UTM), that the top seat isn’t negotiable for anyone who wants to join arms for the 2025 race.

During a “fundraising” gala where he was endorsed for 2025, Chakwera had this to say of his party: “MCP is a national party. The only party with structures across the country, from Chitipa to Nsanje. The best party in the country”, declaring further that “MCP has the best policies and strategies”.

What Chakwera said without being open is that MCP will not be toyed around by anyone to give up the 2025 presidential seat, either on the basis of the 2020 Tonse Alliance agreement or not. In other words, neither him nor MCP will be a second fiddle to someone (read Chilima) or political party (read UTM) that does not have structures across the country or parliamentarians large enough to be counted with more than fingers on a single palm.

The Optical President

Others would be fooled by a photo-op Chakwera performed a couple of hours after the Gala, to say the two are not at loggerheads. He met Chilima at Capital Hill and invited the veep to State House. But in that photo op, Chakwera revealed even more than he probably intended, saying it has taken 2 months for the two to discuss the progress on “charting a recovery path for Malawi”. Remember, Chakwera is the only president who has harnessed the art of photo-ops – the bicep Optical President. Ohh who did not talk about the presidential biceps a couple of months ago? What was the issue before those biceps? Was it the misappropriation of more than K6.5 billion of Covid-19 funds under Chakwera’s watch? Who knows how that story ended after those presidential biceps? The Optical Photography President.

Chakwera and Chilima are not really walking on the same path. This is not news. A few weeks before this covfefe blew up over the weekend, a group of Catholic Bishops visited State House to reconcile the 1st citizen with his number two. Ironically, Chilima is a Catholic.

Beware the Ides of March!

Prior to 2020 Presidential elections, some soothsayers warned of the mystery 2020 Tonse Alliance agreement, “Beware the Ides of March!” Their prophecy, that the agreement would never stand the test of time, was ignored.

It is of no concern to either MCP or Chakwera on how other Tonse Alliance partners, particularly, Vice President Saulos Chilima and his UTM decide to make sense of what Gotani and her colleagues have been saying.  Whether ignoring of the Tonse Alliance agreement to rotate the presidency means, as Chilima once warned, “a recipe for disaster, again”  only time will tell. MCP is ready to fight him. And Chakwera, for those who did not listen to his speech during the fundraising event, is also ready to fight.

The truth, as bitter this pill is for some interested parties to swallow, daggers have openly been drawn. The alliance between MCP and UTM is in shambles. Tonse is in ICU, more like on its deathbed. Even if Chilima and his UTM or those close to him decide to leak the details of the agreement, MCP won’t budge. As highlighted in his fundraising speech, the gloves are on. Chakwera is ready to jump in the ring and fight with MCP, and MCP alone.

But can MCP or any other party go to the polls alone without a partner? I think so. We might have 2 runs, with the first run eliminating other candidates for a 2-horse second race for those with the upmost votes to satisfy the needs of the 50+1 electoral system.

Without such an electoral alliance, a re-run will be inevitable. Chilima will possibly be eliminated in first round – unless the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) decides to allow voters to have on the ballot an option for a second choice on the list of candidates during the first run. MEC could then add the second choice votes to the top two candidate to determine who the winner is should we not have an outright majority.

But this is merely hypothetical grounded on the basis that Chilima still considers the presidency a holy grail; and that Justice Twea’s opinion on the presidency as determined in 2009 during Bakili Muluzi’s attempt for a third term bid won’t dent SKC’s quest. From what I have gathered, he has already put up a swamp of lawyers – including those who were involved in the 2019 presidential election court case – salivating to fight his case should MEC turn his bid down.

Interesting times ahead!