Malawi's Vice-President, Jane Ansah, has accused the country's most senior civil servant of deliberately excluding her from Cabinet business, in an extraordinary public intervention that lays bare tensions at the top of government.
Speaking at her office in an interview on Monday, Dr Ansah said Dr Justin Saidi, the Chief Secretary, had withheld information relevant to Cabinet meetings -- including the customary "Cabinet bag" of papers issued to ministers ahead of each sitting -- and suggested he was doing so with the backing of figures within the governing Democratic Progressive Party keen to marginalise her.
Ansah, a former Attorney-General who went on to serve as a Supreme Court judge and to chair the Malawi Electoral Commission, was at pains to stress that she continues to enjoy a cordial relationship with President Peter Mutharika, and that her grievance lay specifically with the Chief Secretary's conduct.
She disclosed that she had written to Dr Saidi but had received no reply, and that when she attempted to contact him by telephone after learning of a Cabinet meeting she had not been informed of, her calls went unanswered.
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Ansah said she subsequently sent a text message explaining that she had not received a Cabinet bag and apologising for her resulting absence.
Despite the apparent breakdown in communication, Ansah said she had deliberately refrained from raising the matter with the President, citing both constitutional principle and personal conviction.
"In my life I always follow procedures," she said. "That time of going higher has not come -- I need to give him [Chief Secretary Saidi] a chance. We have Section 43 of the constitution in this country; that law says no one should be condemned before that person has been given a chance to defend himself, to explain himself."
Ansah was emphatic that the onus for resolving the impasse lay with Dr Saidi.
"He is the chief secretary for the presidency, and he serves the President and the First Vice-President and Second Vice-President," she said. "If he is not serving me, I have to deal with it -- because he is the one that I should deal with."
The dispute is understood to have a longer history. According to sources familiar with the matter, Saidi led a delegation to Ansah several months ago to request, informally, that she resign the vice-presidency -- a request for which no constitutional or legal basis was cited.
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Ansah is said to have responded by asking Saidi to put the request in writing, undertaking to respond formally once he had done so. No such letter has, to date, materialised.
The episode is the latest indication of strain between Ansah and elements of the administration since she was stripped of responsibility for disaster management and public service reform, with the President increasingly delegating portfolios directly to Cabinet ministers rather than to his deputies.
Government officials have previously denied that Ansah's position is under formal threat, insisting no written request for her resignation has ever been made.
