By Jones Gadama

Leader of Opposition Simplex Chithyola Banda’s International Workers’ Day statement reads like a script written in a house of mirrors.

He points to a governance crisis, economic hardship, corruption, fuel shortages, youth unemployment and low farm gate prices as evidence of government failure, yet he is the last person who should be lecturing the nation on any of these ills.

The rot he decries today was planted, watered, and harvested by the very party and system he served for five years before his party was democratically ousted from power. Malawians have not forgotten. 

Banda’s sudden outrage over the Amaryllis Hotel Scandal insults public memory. Corruption did not arrive in Malawi last week.

The procurement rackets, the inflated contracts, the allowances culture, and the weaponization of state institutions were perfected when his own political family held the keys to Treasury. For years, audit reports gathered dust, whistleblowers were hounded, and public trust was auctioned to the highest bidder.

To now stand on a podium and accuse DPP of tolerating graft is political amnesia at best and deliberate deceit at worst. Accountability cannot be outsourced to speeches; it starts with owning the legacy you helped build. 

The fuel queues he laments did not appear overnight. They are the tail end of years of unsustainable subsidies, forex mismanagement, and politically driven import deals that were signed when his party controlled the levers. The same technocrats he now blames were once shielded by the same opposition benches whenever tough reforms were proposed.

You cannot sabotage the fuel pricing mechanism for years, hollow out reserves through patronage, and then demand an “urgent plan” as if the crisis dropped from the sky. Workers are indeed suffering, but they are paying the price of decisions taken when Chithyola Banda’s allies were in charge of the pump. 

His warning on youth unemployment and low farm gate prices is equally hollow. Malawi’s jobs crisis is the product of two decades of missed industrial policy, abandoned irrigation schemes, and a fertiliser programme run like a campaign tool.

Those failures have fingerprints, and many belong to the same political machine that now claims to speak for the youth.

Farm gate prices collapsed because marketing boards were politicised, ADMARC was stripped of capital, and middlemen with party links were allowed to rig the market. To now pose as the defender of the farmer is to pretend Malawians have no memory of who broke the scale. 

Perhaps the most galling part of Banda’s statement is his condemnation of “politically motivated arrests” and poor conditions for civil servants.

The record is public. When his side held power, critics were dragged to court on dubious charges, civil society leaders were threatened, and civil servants who refused to play politics were transferred to the edges of the country.

Salaries were delayed then too, promotions were sold, and ghost workers thrived. The same institutions he now says are weak were deliberately weakened to protect vested interests. 

Opposition is a constitutional duty, but credibility is its currency. Chithyola Banda is bankrupt on that front. He cannot inherit the sins of his party in silence and then return as a preacher of reform.

If he truly cares about workers, he should start with an apology for the years of plunder and policy failure that created today’s pain.

He should tell Malawians what his side did with the chances they had, and why the same people who manufactured the crisis should be trusted to diagnose it. 

Until then, he should spare the nation the sermons. Malawi does not need recycled outrage from architects of the collapse. It needs solutions from people who did not dig the hole.

Workers’ Day deserves honesty, not hypocrisy. Chithyola Banda had his turn at the wheel, and the car is where it is because of that drive.

He should sit down, shut up, and let the country heal without his commentary.