LILONGWE-(MaraviPost)-Leader of Opposition Simplex Chithyola Banda has reminded Malawians to listen again to the late reggae musician Evison Matafale’s songs, arguing that the country’s development cannot be measured by the price of a bag of maize alone.
Chithyola made the reference on Friday while delivering his closing remarks as Parliament rose sine die, using Matafale’s music to sharpen his criticism of what he described as the government’s narrow focus on cheaper maize while farmers continue to face punishing production costs.
He specifically recalled Matafale’s message that “Chitukuko si Nsima yokha ayi”, saying the late musician was teaching Malawians that development goes far beyond having cheaper nsima on the table.
“Malawians would be happy if Government would achieve more than nsima only,” Chithyola told Parliament.
His argument was blunt: cheap maize means little to a household that cannot afford school fees, medicine or transport.
“You can’t pay school fees with cheaper nsima. You can’t buy medicine with cheap nsima. You can’t use cheap nsima to pay transport costs,” he said, before driving home the point that “development is not nsima only” as Matafale sang in his reggae music.
The opposition leader’s invocation of Matafale was not simply a nostalgic reference to one of Malawi’s most influential musicians.
It was deployed as a political indictment of what Chithyola sees as a mismatch between headline achievements and the wider economic reality facing ordinary Malawians.
He acknowledged that maize is currently cheap but questioned the sustainability of celebrating that development when the cost of producing the crop remains prohibitively high.
According to Chithyola, fertiliser is selling at about K210,000 a bag, meaning farmers are being squeezed from both ends: they face high production costs while receiving prices for their maize that may not adequately compensate them for the resources invested in production.
He said a simple calculation shows that a farmer needs to sell about nine bags of maize to purchase one bag of fertiliser and about 36 bags to cover fertiliser requirements for a hectare.
That arithmetic, he warned, could become a serious threat to food security.
“If serious consideration is not done to balance up between the cost of production and the price of maize, Malawi will brace itself with acute hunger next year coupled with impending El Niño,” he warned.
Chithyola therefore challenged the Ministry of Agriculture to rethink the balance between input prices and maize prices, arguing that government must either reduce the price of fertiliser or increase the farm-gate price of maize to restore an incentive for farmers to continue producing.
“A government cannot celebrate a cheaper bag of maize today while farm inputs are damn expensive. Something needs to be done,” he said.
He called for a revision of farm-gate prices, arguing that farmers must be given sufficient incentive to produce if Malawi is to avoid worsening food insecurity and a deeper cost-of-living crisis.
The Matafale reference consequently became a window into Chithyola’s broader assessment of the country’s development trajectory.
His central argument was that government must not confuse one measure of relief with development itself.
For Chithyola, a family cannot survive on cheap maize alone if it cannot afford education, healthcare, electricity, transport and employment opportunities. His wider speech repeatedly returned to the gap between what Malawians were promised and what they are experiencing.
He said Malawians voted for a better country where basic goods would be affordable, children could access university education, farmers could sell their produce profitably and young people could find jobs regardless of their districts of origin.
They also expected a corruption-free Malawi, an end to fuel queues and a country with reliable electricity.
But Chithyola said the government must now be judged against those expectations as it approaches one year in office.
He stressed that the opposition’s criticism was not driven by hatred of the government but by its constitutional role of providing checks and balances.
“We have seen what government promised, and we have also seen what they have delivered over the year,” he said, framing his intervention around what he called the gap between promises, people’s expectations and service delivery.
He acknowledged that Malawi had been hit by external pressures, including conflict in the Middle East and tighter international credit conditions, but warned government against using global shocks to explain every domestic failure.
“A global shock is not a permission slip,” he said, arguing that Malawians could distinguish between hardships imposed by events outside the country and problems created through domestic decisions and inaction.
The opposition leader linked the food question to the wider foreign exchange crisis, saying Malawi’s shortage of forex was affecting fuel imports, medicines and businesses.
He argued that the country must develop policies capable of generating foreign exchange domestically rather than relying perpetually on scarce reserves.
He also turned to mining, warning that Malawi’s mineral wealth must become a national economic resource rather than another avenue through which wealth could leave the country without adequate accountability.
Kasiya, which he described as one of Malawi’s most important mineral opportunities, featured prominently in that argument. Chithyola said government should investigate reports of large quantities of mineral “samples” allegedly being exported without proper documentation and publish information on volumes extracted, their projected value and when proceeds would return to Malawi.
Electricity was another part of his argument that development cannot be reduced to food prices.
Chithyola described persistent blackouts as a national economic problem, saying electricity is essential to students, hospitals, businesses and ordinary livelihoods.
He argued that when ESCOM struggles to pay independent power producers and forex shortages prevent the importation of spare parts, the consequences spread across the economy, affecting health, education and industry.
His criticism extended to the government’s promised K5 billion Constituency Development Fund allocation, saying communities remained uncertain about when the reformed CDF would actually begin delivering projects.
He said no council had received the CDF at the time of his speech and warned that communities could not be expected to live indefinitely on promises and procedures.
The same theme ran through his criticism of university fees, which he said had doubled from K650,000 to K1.3 million a year for most students, with higher charges for health sciences.
For Chithyola, pricing ordinary Malawians out of university would undermine the country’s long-term human-capital ambitions.
“A country that prices its own children out of university is not investing in its own future,” he said.
He also demanded answers on the Amaryllis Hotel saga, raised concerns about alleged political intimidation and arbitrary arrests, and called for greater transparency in government contracts, spending, mining exports and public decisions.
His overarching message was that development must be judged by the quality of life citizens experience, not simply by isolated statistics or political slogans.
That is why Matafale’s old refrain fitted so neatly into the opposition leader’s closing argument.
The song’s message, as invoked by Chithyola, was that Malawi’s ambition must be larger than filling stomachs. A country can have cheap nsima and still struggle with unemployment, unaffordable education, poor healthcare, unreliable electricity, expensive farm inputs, weak industries and a shortage of foreign exchange.
For Chithyola, that is the distinction between temporary relief and genuine development.
He ended his parliamentary intervention with a series of choices he said Malawi must make: accountability over silence, unity over division, service over intimidation, farmers over slogans, students over fees, light over darkness, stability over political games, the Constitution over fear and transparency over evasion.
And ultimately, he said, Malawi must choose Malawi.
The Matafale reminder therefore landed as more than a musical reference. It was Chithyola’s shorthand for a larger political challenge: Malawians should not mistake cheaper nsima for development when the wider conditions necessary for a dignified life remain beyond the reach of millions.
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