By Linda Kwanjana
There comes a time when silence itself becomes complicity, and for Malawi’s democracy, that moment has arrived.
The systematic humiliation of Vice President Justice Dr. Jane Ansah, SC, RTD, by the very administration she serves must end, not for her sake alone, but for the dignity of the office she holds.
Dr. Ansah did not climb through the ranks of partisan scheming. She was not forged in the rough negotiations of party politics. She was summoned straight from the bench, where she had built a life in quiet jurisprudence, because President Professor Arthur Peter Mutharika deemed her fit to stand as his running mate.
She answered that call as a duty to the nation, trading the dignity of the judiciary for the bruising arena of politics. In return, she has faced disrespect, innuendo, and a cold shoulder from the Democratic Progressive Party that drafted her onto its ticket.
No charge of incompetence, disloyalty, or corruption has ever been laid at her door.
Her only apparent offence is to be a Vice President that her own government seems embarrassed to acknowledge. She was meant to be one of them. Instead she has been made to feel like a stranger in her own administration.
The indignities have become too frequent to dismiss. When the President left the country, Malawians expected the Constitution to be followed and the Vice President to preside over Cabinet.
That courtesy was repeatedly denied. A junior minister was placed in the chair while Dr. Ansah sat present but powerless, reduced to a spectator in the government she was elected to help lead.
What message does that send, that an appointed minister ranks higher than the elected second in command?
The marginalisation extends beyond the Cabinet room. Her office has been stripped of policy substance and meaningful delegation.
By all accounts her days have been reduced to ribbon cuttings, funeral attendance, and Sunday church visits. Such pastoral work matters, but it is not what the Constitution envisions for the second-highest office in the land. She has been made invisible, her role hollowed out until irrelevance became the point.
The latest wound was inflicted before the nation at the Chilima memorial in Nsipe, Ntcheu, a ceremony meant to honour the weight of the Vice Presidency itself.
In such a moment the sitting Vice President should have been central.
Instead President Mutharika chose Minister Bright Msaka, SC, a senior lawyer but junior to both Vice Presidents, to stand as his representative. Dr. Ansah was there, yet again sidelined, while a subordinate occupied the place of honour.
The irony cuts deep, because Dr. Saulos Chilima himself knew this same culture of neglect during his years in office.
History is repeating, and the Maseko Ngoni, Dr. Ansah’s own people, are forced to watch their Impi treated as a figure of ridicule.
President Mutharika appears to act as though he does not see. He offers no explanation, no apology, no correction. Perhaps he assumes a woman of the bench will endure in silence.
But endurance has limits, and the nation is watching. The Vice President deserves respect not because she demands it, but because the Constitution demands it, because the office demands it, and because the women of Malawi who see their own struggle for recognition reflected in her quiet suffering demand it.
If President Mutharika believed Dr. Ansah was fit to be his running mate, then let him treat her as one. If he no longer does, then honesty requires he say so plainly.
But this daily, calculated humiliation of a distinguished daughter of Malawi cannot continue. This is not politics. It is indecency. And decency, unlike power, should never be provisional.
