By Chidi Odinkalu
Joyce Banda, Malawi’s fourth (and first female) president, was in Nigeria earlier this month as guest of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Awka, Anambra State in South-East Nigeria, where she spoke at the 12th annual lecture in memory of the man after whom the university is named. It was also the 119th birthday of Nnamdi Benjamin Azikiwe, Nigeria’s founding president, and the month of the 26th anniversary of the death in 1997 of Malawi’s founding president.
At the lecture, Joyce Banda described Malawi’s judiciary as “award-winning” and many Nigerians in the audience, embarrassed by the contrast with theirs which wallows in infamy, broke out in spontaneous acclamation. The story of how Malawi’s judges became “award-winning” should be of interest to Nigerians.
On the ruins of the banned Nyasaland African
Congress, NAC, Orton Chirwa, Aleke Banda and their confederates, founded the
Malawi Congress Party, MCP, in 1959. The previous year, Dr. Akim Kamnkhwala
Mtunthama Banda, who would later lead the country to Independence as Dr.
Hastings Kamuzu Banda (no relation of Joyce Banda), returned to the brutal
embrace of a colonial jail in the country he left on foot in 1915. In the 42
years of his foreign sojourn, Dr. Banda had travelled through many countries
and continents, acquiring qualifications in anthropology and qualifying as a
medical doctor in both the USA and in the United Kingdom. On his release from
jail in June 1960, Orton handed over to Banda the leadership of the MCP.
In 1964, on the sixth
anniversary of Banda’s return to the territory, Malawi attained Independence
with him as its first prime minister. Orton Chirwa, a graduate, like Nelson
Mandela, of Fort Hare University in South Africa, became Attorney-General and
Minister of Justice. Two months after the cabinet was sworn in, it was in disarray
in a power tussle triggered by allegations of autocracy against Prime Minister
Banda.
In many ways, Nigeria’s
and Malawi’s trajectories managed to converge and diverge. Six months after the
military took over power in Nigeria, Malawi became a Republic in July 1966,
with Hastings Banda as its first president. It was also the month of Nigeria’s
second military coup.
Orton Chirwa had little
regard for the niceties of fair hearing. Prior to Independence, he took issue
with the presumption of innocence and burden of proof in criminal trials,
arguing for their replacement with traditional African ethos. As
Attorney-General he sought these reforms but could not enact them before he was
turfed out of cabinet in September 1964.
Following the collapse of the Chilombwe
Murder Trials in 1969, Banda scrapped criminal trials by regular courts,
transferring jurisdiction over them to so-called Traditional Courts, comprising
a traditional chief as chair, with three citizen assessors and one lawyer. As
both president and Justice minister, he appointed the traditional courts and
they also reported to him. Orton’s ideas had become law.
The Traditional Courts
eventually usurped the regular courts, affording to Hastings Banda a perverse
veneer of process as they handed to him the heads of a succession of his
political opponents in a periodic re-enactment of Biblical blood theatre
designed for his macabre amusement.
The three decades of President
Banda’s reign accounted for the murder and killing of over 6,000 in a rule described
by the Los Angeles Times as characterised by “brutality, nepotism and whim”.
The rule of law in the country was reduced to reading the mood swings of the
man who would come to be known simply as the “Ngwazi”. As he memorably put it:
“Everything. Anything I say is law . . . literally law.”
On Christmas Eve in 1981, Banda
arranged to abduct an exiled Orton Chirwa and his wife, Vera, from Zambia and,
in a tragic irony, had them arraigned for treason in 1983 before the kind of
traditional courts that Orton had advocated for as Attorney-General. Their
trial was a charade. The court denied them legal defence and the right to call
witnesses. Initially sentenced to death on conviction, Banda commuted this to
life imprisonment. Orton spent the remainder of his life in solitary
confinement at the Zomba Prison in Malawi where, in December 1992, he died at
73.
In death, Orton exacted revenge on his nemesis.
Reputedly born around 1898, Banda’s cognitive capabilities were in terminal
decline. On June 12, 1993, Nigeria voted in elections to return the country to
democratic rule after a decade of military rule. Two days later, Malawians
similarly voted overwhelmingly at the end of tortured advocacy to end single
party rule. In Nigeria, the military nullified the vote, extending its rule by
another six years. In Malawi, the outcome stood and in elections the following
year, citizens toppled Banda’s MCP, replacing him with Bakili Muluzi of the
United Democratic Front, UDF.
Under President Muluzi, the
country took steps to reinstate the rule of law, reform the Traditional Courts,
integrate them into infrastructure of the lower magistracy and update the
skills of former traditional court judges through suitable training. In the
judiciary, the task of spear-heading this reform then fell upon two young
judges: Andrew Nyirenda and Rizine Mzikamanda.
As his tenure wound to an end at
the beginning of the millennium, President Muluzi thought himself indispensable
and sought to extend his tenure, pitting him in a battle of wits with the
judiciary who eventually ruled that being term-limited made him ineligible to
run again. In this battle, the judiciary were strengthened by the popular
support of citizens wizened by years under the Ngwazi.
In 2004, Professor Bingu
wa Mutharika succeeded Muluzi. When Bingu died suddenly of a suspected
infarction in April 2012, his younger brother, Peter, an American law professor
for over three decades, who was also Foreign Minister, sought to engineer a
departure from the constitution in order to by-pass the vice-president,
Joyce-Banda, and install himself president.
Despite failing in this
machination, Peter inherited his late brother’s political infrastructure and,
in 2014, got himself elected president in succession to President Joyce Banda,
whose effort to nullify this outcome was foiled by the courts. In 2019,
Mutharika sought re-election and, knowing that he lost, got the electoral
commission to erase enough results to announce him winner. In February 2020,
the Constitutional Court invalidated that declaration.
The year after taking power, in
2015, President Peter Mutharika appointed Justice Andrew Nyirenda as Chief
Justice of Malawi. It fell to Nyirenda’s Supreme Court to affirm in May 2020
that the election organised by the president that appointed him as Chief
Justice was too flawed to be lawful. On May 8, 2020, they ordered a
re-run.
Ahead of national elections in
2019, Nigeria’s President, Muhammadu Buhari compulsorily retired then Chief
Justice, Walter Onnoghen, whose fate was buried by the selfish ambitions of his
own judicial colleagues.
In Malawi, by contrast,
believing that he needed a more pliable court, President Mutharika sought on
June 12, 2020 to oust Chief Justice Nyirenda and his next in line, Justice
Edward Twea. In response, Malawi’s citizens blockaded the streets and the
courts restrained a desperate president. Two weeks later, the citizens
delivered the coup de grace, ousting President Mutharika in the re-run. When he
retired in 2021 as Chief Justice, Andrew Nyirenda became a judge of the IMF
Administrative Tribunal. His successor as the Chief was Rizine Mzikamanda.
In Malawi, citizens learned the hard way that the judiciary is ordinarily a weapon in the hands of the powerful; that judges are not born independent; and that judicial independence is fought for not donated.
Courts and the judges who sit in
them are liable to suffer elite weaponisation in any country in which citizens
are unwilling to provide judges with the political support to enable them to
strategically defect from the status quo.
Malawi’s politicians, having
learnt that this kind of judiciary endangers them all, have become reluctant
converts to judicial independence. Trading in short-term control for long-term
security of expectation, they seek and appoint the best to be judges.
In Nigeria, by contrast,
subsistence remains the cause of politics; so politicians weaponise the
judiciary in advancing a jurisprudence of subsistence. Citizens interested in
changing this could profit from a study of how Malawi changed it.
*Odinkalu
is a US-based professor of Law
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