With the stroke of a pen, the President has also undermined the Judiciary in ways that create a deficit of trust and an erosion of confidence in the country’s judicial system. It is scary. It also takes us more than 15 years backwards.
Mutharika has assented to the Injunctions Bill fully knowing that the courts granted civic groups an injunction stopping further processing of the controversial legislation that cripples individual freedoms and robs citizens of their right to justice.
It is also disheartening to see the whole technical head of the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, solicitor general and secretary for Justice Anthony Kamanga claiming that “I am not aware, the Ministry of Justice is not aware and government is not aware of an injunction restraining the President from assenting to that bill or any bill.”
The PS should be the first to know that the injunction prevented the bill from being further processed after it passed in Parliament. That, according to our rudimentary understanding of the law, simply meant that any steps towards presidential assent would be deemed unlawful.
This is another sad day in the history of democratic Malawi. We are particularly alarmed that the President can walk all over the courts and throw away the rule of law with such abandon.
The desperation with which the Mutharika administration has pushed this bill makes us wonder about the real motives of introducing and then literally shoving this “bad law”—as chairperson of the Legal Affairs Committee of Parliament Henry Phoya said in his passionate and statesman argument against it—down the throat of Malawians.
The President’s decision has confirmed one fact. The arrogance of some government institutions such as the University of Malawi Council and the Ministry of Finance, which have on separate occasions been ignoring court rulings and orders, come at the behest of the President. Read More
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