THURSDAY, 5.00PM
THE Malawi Supreme Court on Thursday threw out an appeal by the state in its attempt to reopen murder and conspiracy charges against former president-for-life Hastings Kamuzu Banda.
The ruling ended a three-year-long judicial process that chief state prosecutor Kamudoni Nyasulu described as “a catharsis” for a young democratic nation that suffered three decades of dictatorship under Banda. “We have to accept the judgment. But it has been a cleansing for the nation,” similar to hearings of South Africa’s truth commission, he said.
Nyasulu added that he may drop fraud charges against Banda and two aides, who allegedly used state funds to build a private business empire.
Malawian President Bakili Muluzu last week made an appeal for the charges to be dropped in the interest of national reconciliation. “It was a request, not an order. I haven’t decided yet,” Nyasulu said.
In a two-hour ruling, Judge Lewis Chatsika said three supreme court judges found no grounds to grant Nyasulu’s appeal against the acquittal in 1995 of Banda, former police minister John Tembo and Leston Likaomba, a senior official in Banda’s secret police. They were accused of ordering the murders of four dissident politicians bludgeoned to death by a police hit squad in 1983.
Banda, ousted in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, is in his 90s and was ruled too senile and ill to attend that trial and the state’s appeal. Earlier this month, Banda announced his retirement from politics with his resignation as head of the Malawi Congress Party, which he led for nearly four decades.