By Micheal Goba Chipeta Sr

It has been reasoned elsewhere that many see politics in its Machiavellian, manipulative sense, backstabbing and spreading false rumours; that politics, however, need not be dirty; that it is through politics that we get things done; that politics is life and we cannot escape it. I totally agree.

Each one of us is an actor on the political stage: you act, whether you choose to get involved or not; whether you choose to be indifferent or not; whether you choose to say something or not; whether you choose to care or not; whether you choose to be concerned or not; whether you know it or not; we are all actors in politics. Spooky, isn’t it? No, not spooky. Sublime, I think.

Of necessity, therefore, when Malawi Congress Party, Lilongwe South Constituency Member of Parliament, Hon. Peter Dimba, MP resigned as Chairperson of the Legal Affairs Committee of Parliament on the ground that “their” efforts to provide checks and balances to the excesses of the Executive, particularly on the fight against corruption, have proved futile, a few thoughts visited me, relentlessly erupting in my head with the threat of lightning and gyring my gut with remarkable force.

At first I felt something like there existed little flies in my gut which, with time, turned into something like little butterflies on their way to being transmogrified into little birds. The little birds, I am afraid, felt like they would soon turn into sizable birds of prey or perhaps baby elephants.

Taking ethics of resignation seriously, Hon Peter Dimba MP should not have resigned, if you ask me. Granted, resigning has a profound role in the moral ecology of the self. It supports personal integrity. It buttresses moral responsibility and ensures accountability to democratic institutions.

However, the foregoing only relate to a robust notion of integrity and responsibility and do not amount to a call for hair-trigger resignations. If it be accepted, as I think should be the case, that it is an inescapable fact about life that, in public life, no persons get all they want all the time; that most officials lose more battles than they win; victories are always imperfect; and public officials find themselves compromising and contributing to imperfect outcomes, Hon Peter Dimba MP should have stayed the course. This option commanded no complication.

His decision to resign, and the reason behind it, as immortal as it is, however, feels incomplete and spawns a deeper ethical complication. Given that he is a Malawi Congress Party Member of Parliament, a party at the core of the very Executive featuring highly in the reason behind his resignation, Hon. Peter Dimba MP is now under a strict moral duty to mount the highest level of dissent against his party. Perhaps a small anecdote from American politics should illustrate my point.

As secretary of state for President Ronald Reagan, George Shultz fought plans of the National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency to trade weapons to Iran in exchange for freeing of hostages.

In November 1986, the administration’s actions exploded in the press and the Iran-Contra scandal was born. Officials such as National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter and CIA Director William Casey pressed to continue the exchanges.

Shultz, however, believed the actions to be fundamentally wrong because they encouraged more hostage taking, undercut administration policy, and damaged President Reagan. He also feared the policy would undermine efforts to end the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

In August 1986, he had submitted a letter of resignation to the president but Reagan refused the resignation and encouraged Shultz to stay. Shultz began a difficult task because he had to stop completely any further arms-for-hostage deals.

He knew his job was on the line, but proud as he was to be secretary of state and conscious as he was of possible achievements of great significance, he knew he could not want the job too much. The resignation in the drawer liberated his integrity to begin the arduous struggle to change policy and not conform.

Might it not be true, on facts and circumstances of our subject of discussion, that Hon. Peter Dimba MP’s resignation cannot be complete unless he also resigns from the party that runs the very Executive the excesses of which his efforts to provide checks and balances futility has visited? We are all actors on the political stage.

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