Malawi President Bingu wa Mutharika has instructed his cabinet ministers not to report to him directly but via his brother Professor Peter Mutharika [pictured] whom we recently unveiled as the de facto vice president, disgruntled cabinet ministers have confided.
President Mutharika is contemplating ceding power to his unelected younger brother due to his own poor health status. The president is stricken with a serious case of prostate cancer.
The younger Mutharika was called back from his academic post at George Washington University in Missouri, in the US deep South, where he was a professor of International Law and Comparative Constitutional Law.
Peter Mutharika was parachuted into his powerful position in Malawi soon after the death of the First Lady Ethel to "assist" the older Mutharika in running government. The maneuver was impossible before that because the late Mrs. Mutharika hated the President's younger brother,
Peter, often describing him as a greedy and unsavory character.
Peter Mutharika has taken a sabbatical to fill in the 'technically' vacant post of Vice President of Malawi and offer personal care and advice to the president following the demise of Mrs. Mutharika.
"We have been told that we should be reporting to the president's young brother as the President needs more time resting but nobody has told us clearly why he [Bingu] wants more time to rest.
"Peter Mutharika has been given all the powers to order a cabinet minister around. Some of us are meant to brief him before meeting the Head of State," a source, who did not want to be identified, said.
The Mutharika administration has the characteristics of a family fiefdom comparable to the Cuban scenario where the ill-fated Fidel Castro appointed his younger brother Raul to act as President.
Constitutional analysts say under the laws of Malawi, the President is "wrong" to give state authority to his unelected brother. Thus the president's act in delegating this control to his brother is illegal.
President Mutharika does not wish to contest a second term, but wishes his younger brother to rule the country in his stead.
Mutharika wishes to announce this formal changeover once he is re-elected in a rigged poll, which he is planning, for May, 2009.
Monday, 25 February 2008
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