By Ntata Stinger:
There is something strangely familiar about what is happening to Parliament.
The controversy began with allegations of serious governance failures in public institutions. Parliament indicated that it intended to investigate NOCMA, Blantyre Water Board, ESCOM, EGENCO, Immigration and others.
Whatever argument may subsequently be made about the precise procedure through which those investigations should have been constituted, Parliament unquestionably possesses constitutional investigative powers. Section 60(3) expressly empowers the National Assembly and its committees to conduct investigations and subpoena persons where necessary for the prudent exercise of Parliament’s functions.
Yet within days, something remarkable happened.
The political conversation ceased to be principally about what might have happened at these institutions. The governing party challenged Parliament.
The Attorney General warned about the legality of the proposed committee arrangements. Then a private citizen, Austin Mkoka, approached the High Court seeking judicial review.
The Court has now temporarily restrained processes for establishing or operationalising the proposed joint ad hoc committees while the case proceeds.
The order reportedly extends beyond the institutions originally identified to “any other government department or agency” targeted through the proposed arrangement.
Parliament, which wanted to investigate, is now itself defending its legality.
Malawians have seen this movie before. When Martha Chizuma led the Anti-Corruption Bureau and pursued corruption investigations involving Zuneth Sattar and politically powerful individuals, legal pressure increasingly accumulated around Chizuma herself.
She was eventually arrested in December 2022 over matters arising from her leaked telephone conversation. A subsequent Commission of Inquiry faulted the circumstances of that arrest, while contemporaneous reporting recorded repeated complaints and court processes directed at her.
The political sensitivity of the underlying investigation was not imaginary. The Sattar investigations reached senior political figures, including then Vice-President Saulos Chilima, and UK proceedings supplied an independent dimension to the allegations surrounding Sattar’s dealings in Malawi.
The important question is therefore not whether every legal complaint against Chizuma was illegitimate.
Nor should anyone presently allege, without evidence, that Mkoka was instructed by the DPP, the Executive or anybody else to approach the Court.
The question is about the pattern.
Why does the law appear to acquire such remarkable energy against an accountability institution when that institution begins pursuing politically inconvenient accountability?
Consider what should ordinarily happen. If a public institution is accused of serious malfeasance and Parliament lawfully demands answers, the institution should answer. If it believes Parliament has exceeded its constitutional authority, that institution can contest Parliament’s demand. That is healthy constitutional disagreement.
But something different should concern us: when the institutions facing scrutiny require no visible political mobilisation of their own because other actors begin fighting the accountability battle around them.
That is where Malawi’s corruption problem becomes deeper than weak institutions.
For decades, governance reform has prescribed stronger institutions. Strengthen the ACB. Strengthen Parliament. Strengthen the courts. Give institutions independence. Pass better laws.
But what happens when one of those institutions actually becomes independent?
Martha Chizuma attempted to exercise the independence supposedly demanded of an ACB Director. The result was an extraordinary accumulation of legal and institutional pressure around the investigator herself.
Now Parliament is attempting to exercise constitutional oversight over alleged failures that other accountability mechanisms have evidently not resolved. Again, attention is rapidly moving away from the allegations and towards the legality of the institution attempting scrutiny.
This is what I call Politicojuridity.
The problem is not necessarily that institutions lack legal powers. It is that political interests and legal authority become so misaligned that the legal system can be mobilised in ways that preserve legal form while frustrating accountability.
In such a system, political power does not need to capture every institution.
That is the important point. If an accountability institution is politically compliant, there is little need to restrain it. The difficulty arises when an institution refuses political accommodation. The struggle then moves elsewhere. Political resistance becomes legal resistance. The question changes from what happened? to does this institution have the power to investigate what happened?
The legal gaze reverses.
The watchdog becomes the defendant. And this may explain why governance reforms repeatedly disappoint us. Reformers strengthen institutions individually while leaving untouched the political relationships within which those institutions must exercise their authority.
You can reform the ACB. But if the system surrounding the ACB remains unreformed, the system can turn upon the ACB. You can strengthen Parliament. But if Parliament actually uses that strength against politically consequential interests, the constitutional system may suddenly become extraordinarily interested in the limits of Parliament’s power.
None of this means Parliament is above the law. If the Speaker acted unlawfully, the courts must be able to say so. Judicial review is indispensable to constitutional government. But judicial review should make us more interested, not less, in the underlying governance pattern.
The question Malawi must begin asking is not merely whether its accountability institutions are independent on paper. We must ask what happens when they actually behave independently. When they pursue politically consequential accountability, does the rest of the governance system reinforce that accountability? Or does legal pressure begin accumulating against the institution doing the pursuing?
That is the difference between institutional reform and systemic reform. Malawi does not merely need more watchdogs. It needs an accountability system in which institutions reinforce rather than neutralise one another when corruption is confronted.
Because the real test of an accountability system is not whether it creates watchdogs. It is what the system does when one of them actually starts barking.
