The Adventures of Ken Kandodo

Next time President Joyce Banda wants to hire people to assist her in whatever she wants to achieve, let her first do due diligence on them to establish if they are the kind of people that she needs.

Because if she does not first screen the attributes of such people and probe into their backgrounds, she will be surprised that things are not working for her, despite their pretended loyalties to her and seeming hard work.

Ken Kandodo is one of the many people President Banda will be disappointed she never needed all along because despite looking innocent on the surface, they are dangerous people who could be helping everyday making her government fail to fulfill its mandate in many ways.

Kandodo, a man who possesses the innocence of an angel in his appearance, has just been found in a lodge naked and fully charged after an overdose of viagra as he tried to prove his sexual credentials on a teenager at Namitete in Lilongwe.

This news caught those who don’t know Kandodo well with surprise. But not to those who know him well from far. Kandodo is quite a mischievous man despite his saintly demeanor.

While working as Director of Operations of Blantyre Print and Publishing in Blantyre in the 90s, he and his wife spent a night in a graveyard naked in Chilomoni to fulfil conditions of an alleged money multiplier late Mwitha that the money he had given to him to “bless” would multiply and they would become rich.

This never happened. Instead the board of Blantyre Print and Publishing chaired by John Tembo and attended by Managing Director David Green sacked Kandodo.

He was replaced by Tembo’s nephew William Kadzamira.

Kandodo was not sacked because he stayed naked at a graveyard at night. He was given the boot because the money he gave to Mwitha was obtained through usury and he used a Mercedes which the company had just bought for him as his official car as collateral.

When he reported for duties after his night at the graveyard, he came using an ordinary vehicle. This continued for week. That is when management of the company got suspicious. Queries to Kandodo and investigations established that the vehicle was being withheld in a compound of a usury provider at Sigerege in Blantyre.

The company moved to recover the vehicle and deducted the money from Kandodo’s terminal benefits.

This is not all of Kandodo’s adventures. When broke while he worked as Director of Operations, he would visit different Times Bookshop outlets, one of the subsidiaries of Blantyre Print and Publishing then, and he would give post dated cheques to the shop managers in exchange for cash they had made on the particular day. The cheques would always be referred to the drawer and the shop managers would be deducted their salaries to recover the money.

This is the kind of man that late Bingu wa Mutharika, trusted to manage the economy during his second term as Minister of Finance. Any wonder chaos started running into the economy with him at Treasury?

Today, President Banda has included him in her cabinet.

And as per the terms of the Constitution, Kandodo as cabinet minister, is the President’s advisor.