As Ad Hoc Chair Takes Testimony of Questionable Reliability to the Bank: Testimony Without Verification is No Evidence

As Ad Hoc Chair Takes Testimony of Questionable Reliability to the Bank

The credibility of any public inquiry rests on one principle: evidence must be tested before it is trusted. That principle has long been recognised in philosophy, law, and judicial practice. As philosopher C.A.J. Coady argued in his 1992 book titled “Testimony: A Philosophical Study”, testimony is an important source of knowledge, but it requires careful evaluation. Testimony is not self-authenticating; it must be examined for consistency, accuracy, and reliability. The recent testimony of UTM-affiliated witness Moses Mnthakomwa illustrates why this principle matters.

According to Mthakomwa’s testimony, he received a telephone call at 20:19 hours from his friend, Major General Msonthi, informing him that the missing aircraft had already been located. Mnthakomwa further claimed that he did not believe what he heard because he placed greater confidence in what the President had told the nation, that the aircraft was still missing.

During the proceedings, panel member for Dedza Kasina, Joshua Malango, reminded the witness that the President’s national address announcing that the aircraft remained missing occurred at approximately 23:00 hours, almost three hours after the alleged 20:19-hour telephone call. If that timeline is correct, Mnthakomwa could not have rejected the alleged call because of a presidential statement that had not yet been made.

This inconsistency strikes at the internal coherence of the witness’s own narrative. When a key explanation depends on an event that had not yet occurred, the testimony demands rigorous scrutiny. Major Msonthi needs to come forward, testify and then test his testimony independently before even taking his word for it. “Did you tell Mr. Mnthakomwa that the plane was found on 10 June”? “Were you at the site of the wreckage on that day or you were informed”? “Who else in the military knew that the plane was found on that day”? Let him answer to these questions and then subject his answers to a triangulation test to establish their undoubted truth. Until, what Mnthakomwa has testified remain hearsay which cannot allow the Committee Chair to make conclusive remarks about it.

As long as Mnthakomwa’s hearsay evidence relies entirely upon what another individual allegedly said, whilst the alleged declarant has not publicly confirmed making that statement is even more telling of a rushed satisfaction on the part of the Chair. Without corroboration through phone records, forensic analysis, contemporaneous communications, or consistent testimony from the alleged speaker, the claim remains unverified.

Public inquiries exist precisely because rumours, assumptions, and recollections are insufficient substitutes for evidence. A responsible inquiry must triangulate testimony by comparing it with objective facts, documentary records, expert analysis, and independent witnesses. The Committee owes the public more than compelling stories. It owes the public demonstrably reliable evidence. Until the alleged 20:19-hour conversation is independently verified through objective means, and General Msonthi himself being called to make his representations under oath on that issue, it should remain a suspicious allegation, not a proven fact.

The integrity of the inquiry depends not on how dramatic testimony sounds, but on how rigorously it withstands scrutiny. Invariably, a commission or committee of inquiry derives its legitimacy from one indispensable quality: impartiality. The public must believe that those entrusted with uncovering the truth have not already decided what that truth is. That is why the conduct of an inquiry’s leadership matters just as much as the evidence presented before it.

But listen to this: Following the testimony of Moses Mnthakomwa, the Chairperson of the Ad Hoc Committee of Inquiry, Walter Nyamilandu, reportedly remarked that the Committee had “now started receiving tangible evidence.”

First, this statement implicitly suggests that all of the evidence previously presented was not regarded as tangible or persuasive. Such an assessment, that the Chair promptly makes independent of the input of other members of the Committee is suspicious. It undeniably creates the impression that he has unilaterally excluding all members of the Committee, weighed all evidence thus far been heard.

Second, and more importantly, the statement followed testimony that itself appears to require substantial verification. The witness’s account contains an apparent inconsistency regarding the sequence of events and relies heavily upon an alleged conversation that has not, on the available information, been independently confirmed by the alleged speaker.

Ordinarily, an inquiry committed to procedural fairness would refrain from characterising such evidence as especially significant until it has been tested through cross-examination, corroborated by documentary evidence, and evaluated alongside expert findings.

They say justice requires not only that decision-makers remain unbiased but also that they appear unbiased to reasonable observers. Public confidence diminishes whenever a chairperson appears to embrace evidence before it has been thoroughly examined.

This concern becomes more acute if the Committee appears to be gravitating toward particular narratives before completing its investigative work. Some observers have suggested that the narrative that Mr. Mnthakomwa and Mr. Nyamilandu appear to jointly push is to generate an impression that either survivors remained alive after the crash but were left without assistance, or that survivors were murdered after the crash.

Such dispositions are not light in their nature. There is need for forensic science, not some cocaine-inspired or propaganda-aligned inference, to lead the inquiry. If SIM cards are said to have been tampered with, the Committee should rely upon digital forensic experts. If telephone communications are central to the timeline, telecommunications records should be examined. If survival after impact is alleged, medical, aviation, and rescue experts should establish the facts. The Committee’s responsibility is not to validate hypotheses but to test them.

Every investigation naturally begins with competing theories. Good investigators remain willing to discard those theories whenever evidence points elsewhere. Poor investigations become dangerous when evidence is selectively interpreted to confirm a pre-meditated narrative.