President Lazarus Chakwera has gone the way of those who occupied that office before him. The indictment against him, however, is more severe for several good reasons.
Firstly, as a believing pastor, we took it for granted he would be more discerning and, crudely put, more sensible than his predecessors. He has been anything but.
Secondly, he, of all people, should know better as to what happens to leaders who grow arrogant and tone deaf. He himself led the assaults on President Arthur Peter Mutharika in parliament with his fiery speeches. He accused APM of the very things he now is flagrantly engaged in. It didn’t end all too well for APM, did it, who has reinvented and reimagined himself as a social media star who produces the occasional video of him enjoying the good time with his wife, if at all.
Thirdly, the amount of goodwill with which Lazarus swept into office was staggering. Equally staggering, if not more intense, has been the speed and recklessness with which he has squandered that goodwill. APM was the absent president, showing up once in a while to mumble a few words only he and a few acolytes could understand. Joyce Banda was, well, to express it charitably, clueless. We may forgive her for, in the words of some, not being sophisticated. Bakili Muluzi was not very well educated, either; the less said about that the better. But what excuse does Lazarus have, with everything at his disposal?
It is a shameful and terrifying descent of the man of God. He once told us God told him to pastor the nation. Abusa, ask yourself in your heart: are you pastoring the nation? Like a backslidden Christian, his duplicity is now visible for all to see.
At first he pretended to support Martha Chizuma, the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) Director General. However, events from December 2022 to date prove he is as entangled in the corruption issues as his goons who have been doing the dirty work for him.
Now like the believer who has been hiding his sins, he is no longer ashamed and has arrived at that backslidden stage where instead of repenting, you start justifying or explaining your sins, such as declaring that the interdiction of the ACB DG is according to the law. Which law, abusa?
Unless he changes course radically and urgently, the future of Lazarus Chakwera is plain for all to see. We don’t even need Prophet Austin Liabunya to put on one of his shiny suits and pointed shoes and tell us in a ‘prophetic’ YouTube broadcast that, one, Chakwera will go down in history as that one president who had all to change the course of this country but messed it up; and, two, he will lose in 2025.
His successor will most likely jail him. All the boys and lawyers running around him and giving funny advice will definitely desert him. His pastor friends, some running their own rackets of theft and plunder, may, at best, visit him at Maula Prison with the customary ‘we are praying for you’. Not even the Lord will redeem him!
