Exposed: Opposition MCP legislators turn Chilima’s plane crash inquiry into witness-beating exercise to save Chakwera, MCP

By Kenneth Bwanali

**LILONGWE-(MaraviPost)-**What is happening before the Parliamentary Ad-Hoc Committee is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Some Malawi Congress Party (MCP) Members of legislators appear less interested in allowing eyewitnesses to tell their stories than in breaking their credibility, intimidating them and picking apart their character—particularly when their evidence raises uncomfortable questions about events surrounding the June 10, 2024 crash.

Look at what happened to Ephraim Duma.

Instead of limiting the questioning to establishing what he allegedly saw, MPs went as far as questioning his mental state, with one asking whether he should undergo a brain examination. Another even suggested that soldiers should fire shots at him to test his extraordinary claim about surviving gunfire.

Now the Committee is hearing from community witnesses from Nthungwa, including Flora Mkandawire.

Mkandawire has told the Committee that she saw the aircraft before it crashed, encountered soldiers in the forest who ordered her and others to leave, and that a call was made to Mzuzu police after the crash. She has also alleged that she was later threatened and that her two sons were taken by police. These allegations still require independent corroboration—but that is precisely why they should be investigated rather than buried under political attacks on the witness.

And here is where the MCP problem becomes obvious.

When testimony becomes politically uncomfortable, the response from some MCP MPs increasingly looks like a courtroom defence strategy: attack the witness, create doubt about the witness, ridicule the witness and hope the evidence disappears with the witness’s credibility.

MCP MP Sylvester Ayuba has already openly framed Duma’s testimony as a political attack on MCP, alleging that the DPP coached him. Those remain allegations, and no evidence establishing that claim has been presented before the Committee.

So Malawians are entitled to ask a simple question:

Is the MCP side of this Committee investigating the death of Saulos Chilima—or fighting a political battle to protect the reputation of MCP and its former leader, Lazarus Chakwera, who was President when the aircraft crashed?

If these witnesses are wrong, prove them wrong with evidence.

If their accounts contradict the technical evidence, produce that evidence.

But turning every uncomfortable eyewitness into a target for humiliation and character assassination does not erase what that witness has told the Committee.

The dead cannot speak.

The witnesses can.

And if the truth is what the Committee is looking for, MCP MPs should be very careful not to make the witness box look like the place where inconvenient testimony goes to die.

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