Infighting at MBC: Mungomo in smear campaign against Sumbuleta

Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) Director of Programmes Albert Mungomo is reportedly distributing a series of anonymous letters attacking MBC Director General Aubrey Sumbuleta, President Peter Mutharika and his aide, Ben Phiri among others.

This week messages have gone viral on email and Whatsapp message sharing platform chronicling wide allegation against Sumbuleta ranging from abuse of office and sexual offences.

However, an investigation reveal that the IP addresses from which the slanderous emails originated have been traced to IT gadgets used by Albert Mungomo, one of the senior managers at the public broadcaster.

According to our investigations, Mungomo’s official email address is [email protected] and it uses IP address number.16.345.279.41. The slanderous mail in circulation uses the same IP address but with a fake account named “[email protected]”.

For close to three months now, Mungomo has been sending malicious emails to almost all media houses in Malawi but the organizations have been turned them down due to their slanderous nature.

Using account name [email protected], he sent the emails to media houses in July this year and the second anonymous letter followed on the 25th of August, 2015. The latest version of these anonymous letters was sent to the media houses on Thursday 24th September, 2015.

In all these attempts, the emails used the same IP route and address used by Mungomo’s official email.

This is not the first time Mungomo has been connected to chaos at MBC. Previously, Mungomo and his third wife Gloria Banda had been accused of running the programmes department at MBC as a family business.

Sources in administration at MBC say in the department Mungomo is Director while his wife Gloria is Chief which means Gloria reports to her husband.

But in this current of attacks, Mungumo has gone flat out hitting his own Director General and his colleagues in the ruling DPP including the president’s special aide Ben Phiri.

Nyasa Times understands that Mungomo has a grudge with the DPP leadership and that’s why he is attacking everyone he feels is close to the DPP ass he claims to have done so much for Peter Mutharika to win but he was not rewarded accordingly.

‘‘ Come and ask anybody here.. Albert Mungomo says Mutharika brought Sumbuleta to head MBC simply because he is Lhomwe.. Instead of making him Director General, apparently that’s what they had agreed,’’ said one of the MBC employee.

The investigations have also discovered that Mungomo was demanding that he be returned as Presidential Press Secretary following the 2014 election victory by the DPP in May last year.

For two years, Mungomo served as Presidential Press Secretary for late President Bingu Wa Mutharika.

Inside sources at MBC say that, Sumbuleta was the one who promoted Albert Mungomo to the position of Director of Programmes after previous Director General Benson Tembo turned down pressure from government to give Mungomo the post.

Investigations have further revealed that the email was first circulated to three receivers whose IP addresses are owned by Globe Internet Services but rented to MBC. At the time of posting the story we had not traced the users of those IP addresses.

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