Facebook Post By Onjezani Kenani
The first sign of trouble came barely a month after victory, back in 2020, when President Lazarus Chakwera appointed his cabinet. It was bloated, with 32 in it. We had just emerged from six years of Peter Mutharika’s first term, throughout which he maintained a cabinet of no more than 20. Those of us expecting a lean cabinet were disappointed but decided to keep quiet to give the new government a chance. Some did talk, of course, when siblings and spouses were appointed to the cabinet, making it look like a connected family’s cabinet. Even the international media latched onto that observation, but soon it petered out and life moved on.
Then came the sweet promise during the swearing-in ceremony. “I’m giving you 90 days to perform,” Chakwera said in his usual fake American accent. “After which, I will assess your performance. If you do not perform, I’ll fire you.”
That assessment never came. When the media cornered him, Chakwera dissolved his entire cabinet, a grand flourish that excited us for a week. When a new cabinet was appointed, however, it turned out there was nothing new about it, as they were the same old faces, with a very slight shuffling of the deck.
The man, it was beginning to emerge, was terribly slow in decision-making, and did not seem to have any means of evaluating the performance of his cabinet ministers at all. There was talk of recruiting the services of the office of Tony Blair, a former British Prime Minister. A Presidential Delivery Unit was, apparently, set up, but the value it added has never been seen.
Six months into Chakwera’s tenure, more than K1 billion meant to fight COVID-19 disappeared into people’s pockets. The President appeared on national television attempting to look like he was in charge. He warned that anyone who had stolen any money was going to be fired. Indeed, he fired one cabinet minister, and few civil servants were arrested, all of whom were released without charge a few days later. There the story ended.
But the rot was only stretching its limbs. By October 2021, corruption scandals sprouted like mushrooms after rain. Among them the Zuneth Sattar affair, a scandal so large it crossed oceans. The Anti-Corruption Bureau named names, and the President responded by stripping his own vice president, Saulos Chilima, of delegated powers. It sounded dramatic, until nothing really happened. Chilima was arrested, yes, but the case meandered through the courts before fizzling out in 2024 like a candle left in the wind.
Meanwhile, the government’s promise to sell fertilizer at K4,995 turned out to be a bad joke. Farmers queued in the dust for fertilizer that arrived late, scarce, and at prices 25 times higher. Jobs? The vaunted “one million” never materialized beyond a few thousand temporary placements that vanished as quickly as they came.
The economy itself began to wheeze. Fuel queues became a permanent feature of our towns, long metallic snakes curling around service stations. Forex dried up, and the kwacha shed value like ice in the October sun. Travelers stood helpless as passports ran out of ink and paper; from June to mid-September 2025 the printing machines sat silent, and the immigration offices resembled refugee camps of stranded students and businesspeople.
Even the grand promises of foreign billions proved fake. Remember the Bridgin Foundation, with its talk of US $6.8 billion in development funds? We are still waiting for a single tambala. The so-called Fertilizer Butchery scandal — paying a British meat shop nearly a billion kwacha for fertilizer that never arrived — would have been funny if it weren’t our money.
By the time Vice President Chilima died in that fateful military plane crash in June 2024, the nation was numb. We mourned him, but also our own dashed hopes. Michael Usi was sworn in to replace him, another reshuffle in a government that had long since lost its shine.
We arrived in September 2025, election month, tired and poorer, the air thick with unkept promises. The queues for fuel and passports, the endless search for dollars, the scandals that came and went without consequence, these were no longer surprises. They were simply life under Lazarus Chakwera, a presidency that began in triumph and ended in whimper. It didn’t bother Chakwera one bit that people would be going to the polls from long queues at filling stations. A reverend, he resorted to the cheapest way of winning over the people, by asking for their forgiveness.
And so, the circle closes. Five years of lofty promises and restless queues have brought us here: a nation standing in line not just for fuel and passports, but for change itself. The forgiveness Chakwera sought from the pulpit of politics never came. Instead, Malawians offered him the cold arithmetic of the ballot box.
Now the old rival he once dismissed as yesterday’s man waits in the wings, a million votes ahead, proof that age is not the insult it was made out to be. The Malawi Congress Party clings to its slogans like a drowning man to floating planks, each press conference a last gasp of bravado against the rising tide of defeat. Their chants sound less like victory cries than the echo of a funeral dirge.
What began in 2020 as a hymn of renewal ends in 2025 as a cautionary tale. The preacher-president who promised rebirth leaves behind an exhausted congregation, and a nation that views him as a dishonest and perhaps even a dishonorable man.