The lead attorney for Malawi’s former President says Bakili Muluzi is aware of plans by the Anti-Corruption Bureau to re-arrest him for allegedly stealing about 10 million dollars of public. This comes after President Bingu Wa Mutharika reportedly threatened to arrest leaders of the opposition if his government’s budget is not approved by the opposition-controlled parliament. Meanwhile the former president has assembled a team of lawyers to strategize before his imminent arrest.
Fahad Assani is the lead attorney for Ex-President Bakili Muluzi. From the capital, Lilongwe he tells reporter Peter Clottey more about Muluzi’s imminent arrest.
“We too are just gathering this information in the grapevine as well as what has been reported on the Internet the world over that there are plans by the system to arrest again the former president on the allegation that he embezzled or he pocketed monies meant for government, while he was the head of state. These rumors have been very persistent in Malawi and were heightened by the threats that were made by the head of state when he had a mass rally about three Sundays ago,” Assani noted.
He dismissed as non-entities people who are speculating that Ex-President Bakili Muluzi is clandestinely working to bring down President Mutharika’s administration.
“I look at these things as words which are uttered by people who are under siege or they do not have self-confidence because there is no such plot as far as I’m concerned because I’m very closed to the former president. I know that what he is looking at is to challenge him during elections in 2009 when they are due. But as long as the period of elections are not there yet, there is no plan to bring down the government,” he pointed out.
Assani said the government just wants to divert people’s attention from what he called its lack of ideas to effectively rule the country.
“These are just sayings which are made by the government as a way of scaring other people, and at the same time just to divert attention that mistakes were made when the president decided to dump the party that brought him to power, and what is happening now is exactly a direct result of that lack of foresight,” Assani said.
He said former President Muluzi least expected President Mutharika whom he allegedly anointed as his successor to have what Muluzi has described as divisive tendencies.
“It’s a huge disappointment, particularly considering that our constitution mandates any sitting president to provide executive leadership in the interest of national unity. And since our president was elected, he has been a very, very divisive President. And he keeps on dividing society along religious lines, along political lines. And this is not the leadership, which he (Muluzi) feels he could have seen in our current president because in deed as the former president even has said during the campaign, now that politics has really taken its hold in a democracy, which he fought for very hard when he was fighting the one-party state,” he noted.