There is a game called ‘Follow the Leader.’ The game is played by children. But there is also a version for adults. In the children’s game, one child is chosen to be the leader. The rest of them line up behind the leader. First and foremost the game teaches children to follow directions. These are visual directions. The players in the game have to pay attention to what is happening in front of them, or risk being ‘out’. This builds their concentration plan. The game helps the players to develop gross motor skills as the kids are using the large muscles of their bodies. The game thus helps the children to develop speed, balance, agility, directionality and other skills.

This is a good game for children as they are in their formative stages of developing their motor skills. But not adults who are expected to have long developed such skills. The main disadvantage of the game is that it does not teach the children to think, a skill that normal adults are presumed to have.

For the players in the ‘Follow the Leader’ game, the leader in front is presumed to be the one thinking for everyone who wants to remain in the team. One problem of the game is that it entrenches the fear that there is no life outside the team. The danger is that when the leader has run out of ideas and is leading the team into a dungeon, there is no one to stop the plunge.

This has been the scenario in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) since the party was ousted from government in June 2020. There are so many highly educated men and women in the rank and file of the party. Some with PhDs. But most of them seem to have relegated the business of thinking to the party leader. For the rest of them staying outside the leader’s circle is disdainful if not an abomination.

Fortunately, while many are in tow with the leadership regardless of the direction they are going, there are exceptions. Some members of the party think it is perilous to continue lining up behind an octogenarian leader who presided over the party’s ousting from power on June 23 2022. It is this realization by some members of the party that under the status quo in terms of leadership, the group is headed towards a disaster, is what has ripped DPP apart. And with disastrous consequences.

So some children are not playing by the rules of the game because such ground rules have lost relevance under the circumstances. The embarrassing scenario DPP went through this week is something that has been long coming. This week an elect group of DPP executive members gathered at Peter Mnutharika’s Page House in Mangochi. And there they elected Mulanje South legislator George Chaponda as the new Leader of Opposition, replacing Mulanje Central MP, Kondwani Nankhumwa.

Surely with all those lawyers and PhDs in the executive the group should have done better.

The fly in the caramel of milk is that for the party to hold an elective convention, which should have happened yesterday, it needs to redefine ground rules. But to rub salt on a festering wound, the leader’s approach to the problem at hand is itself divisive as it is being viewed as increasingly taking sides instead of being neutral. Some of the people the party tasked to prepare the groundwork for the elective convention are interested parties. This is why one camp in the party thinks the leader in front has nothing about him to keep the rest of the members in tow.

Mutharika is listening too much to a cartel which is compromised. What do you expect from a ring which is itself interested in the party’s leadership position? The sidelining of some NEC members to the executive meeting last weekend was the height of some ill-advised patronage. It just shows how dangerously daggers are drawn between the two camps in the party. Why is the party replete with knowledgeable people stooping so low as to fail to do the basics right? 

The collateral damage from DPP’s infighting manifested itself on Wednesday when two legislators claiming to be the party’s chief whips reported at Parliament for work in the Business Committee of Parliament. But when all is said and done people still look at where the buck stops—Mutharika—as the root cause of all the problems in the party. He is digging a hole for the party. 

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