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Malawi President Challenges Transparency International Report
Real estate news By Peter Clottey
26 October 2007
Malawi’s President Bingu Wa Mutharika is reportedly upset and is challenging Berlin-based Transparency International to substantiate its findings that corruption is rampant in his country. In its latest corruption perceptions report, Transparency International identifies Malawi as a nation with widespread graft, saying its ranking has slipped. President Mutharika also questions the methodology used by the corruption watchdog that led to its conclusions. Some Malawi political analysts say the president’s outburst is misplaced since he has done very little to fight graft as he promised.
Meanwhile, Malawi’s anti-corruption bureau says it has handled 900 graft cases in the last two years and has only managed to conclude 12 of them. Political Science lecturer at Malawi’s Mzuzu University Noel Mbowela tells reporter Peter Clottey that the findings have become a rude awakening to President Mutharika. “To me the challenge is more of a face saver in the sense that here we have a president who is working hard to build a good image for the country. And yet when he’s been confronted with a situation, which is real, he wouldn’t obviously take that. To a larger extent, the findings of Transparency International would be credible rather than what the president is saying,” Mbowela noted.
He says President Mutharika has not followed through on his two-year-old pledge to fight corruption. “He has not done enough, and obviously that is why he’s been taken unawares by the Transparency International report. He hasn’t done enough in the sense that I think the campaign has been more theoretical than practical. We’ve had a lot of I’m going to arrest all the culprits who did this or that, but when you try to check what is happening on the ground, you see the kind of steps that have been taken are so pathetic so to say. A few arrests have been made, so surely there’s been little that has been done and there is more that needs to be done as of now,” he said.
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