Malawi Parliament: Malawi Chilima Inquiry Witness Duma's Mental State Questioned

• A parliamentary committee investigating the death of Malawi's former Vice-President Saulos Chilima intensely questioned witness Ephraim Duma.
• One MP suggested Duma undergo a brain scan to assess his mental state, while another proposed soldiers fire shots at him to test claims of bullet resistance.
• Duma's testimony faced scrutiny over the technical impossibility of an open aircraft door mid-flight and his inability to read a report without glasses.
• The committee chairperson defended Duma's sobriety and consistency, and Duma agreed to physically demonstrate events at the crash site.
• The session adds complexity to the inquiry, highlighting challenges in assessing conflicting and seemingly implausible witness accounts.

The proceedings underscore the critical importance of rigorous evidence assessment in parliamentary inquiries, especially when faced with testimony that stretches the bounds of plausibility.

The parliamentary Ad Hoc Committee tasked with investigating the tragic death of former Vice-President Saulos Chilima recently convened a session marked by extraordinary and at times bizarre exchanges. Central to the proceedings was the testimony of a key Malawi Chilima inquiry witness, Ephraim Duma, whose credibility and mental state became the subject of intense scrutiny from committee members. The session saw open questioning of Duma's competency, leading to a heated debate among the legislators on how best to assess the veracity of his remarkable account.

Committee member Joshua Malango directly challenged Duma, inquiring whether he would consent to a brain scan to allow MPs to thoroughly examine his thinking process and overall Ephraim Duma mental state. Malango's pointed question, translated from Chichewa, asked if Duma was "willing to be tested for a brain condition so we can examine your thinking." However, this suggestion was met with immediate opposition from the committee's chairperson, Walter Nyamilandu, who staunchly defended the witness. Nyamilandu asserted that Duma was entirely "sober," consistent in his statements, and fully cognizant of the information he was relaying to the inquiry.

Following this exchange, Nyamilandu directly asked Duma if he would be prepared to travel to the Chikangawa crash site to physically re-enact the events as he claimed to have witnessed them. Duma readily agreed, indicating his immediate readiness to undertake such a demonstration, even if it meant departing that very day. This willingness, however, did not deter other committee members from probing deeper into the plausibility of his testimony.

The inquiry continued to challenge the Chilima inquiry witness credibility, moving beyond questions of mental state to the technical feasibility of Duma's narrative. MP James Mpunga pressed Duma on a critical detail: how Vice-President Chilima could have been standing at an open aircraft door while the plane was airborne. Mpunga highlighted the fundamental aviation principle that such doors are not designed to open during flight. Duma, in response, conceded his inability to answer this specific technical query, explaining that he was merely recounting his observations from that day and could not comment on aviation matters, having never personally flown on an aircraft.

Further escalating the unusual nature of the proceedings, Malango introduced a startling proposition. To verify Duma's prior claims of surviving gunfire, Malango suggested that soldiers be enlisted to fire shots at the witness. This extraordinary proposal aimed to ascertain whether Duma genuinely believed he possessed a supernatural resistance to bullets, possibly due to treatment by a traditional healer. Such a suggestion underscores the lengths to which some committee members were prepared to go to test the witness's account.

In another instance, Malango attempted to compare Duma's testimony against a specific paragraph from "the Bureau's report." However, Duma stated he was unable to read the document without his eyeglasses, explaining that he suffered from an eyesight problem and had not brought his reading aids to the session. These incidents collectively illustrate the multifaceted challenges faced by the committee in assessing the reliability of the Malawi Chilima inquiry witness Duma.

The dramatic session adds a significant layer of complexity and uncertainty to the ongoing Malawi VP crash investigation, which is scrutinizing the June 2024 crash that tragically claimed the lives of Vice-President Chilima and eight other individuals. The parliamentary committee is clearly grappling with a range of witness accounts that are not only conflicting but, in several instances, appear to defy conventional logic and technical possibility. The intense focus on Ephraim Duma's testimony, including the Duma brain scan proposal and the bizarre suggestion of testing his bullet resistance, highlights the extraordinary difficulties inherent in such a high-profile inquiry.

Beyond Duma's contentious testimony, another committee member, MP Njawala, called for an additional individual to be summoned to provide evidence. This person had reportedly claimed on Zodiak Online to have observed the aircraft circling in the sky prior to the fatal crash. The inclusion of new, potentially corroborating or contradictory witnesses further complicates the task of the Malawi parliamentary committee Chilima, which must sift through diverse and often challenging narratives to establish the definitive circumstances surrounding the tragic incident. The proceedings underscore the critical importance of rigorous evidence assessment in parliamentary inquiries, especially when faced with testimony that stretches the bounds of plausibility.

This article highlights the challenges of witness credibility and evidence assessment in high-profile parliamentary inquiries, particularly when testimony is contentious or implausible. Lawyers advising clients or preparing witnesses for similar commissions of inquiry should anticipate intense scrutiny and potentially unconventional lines of questioning regarding witness competency and the factual basis of their accounts.

Source: Original reporting via Nyasa Times