The dismissal of 172 campaign handouts cases by the Office of the Registrar of Political Parties is more than an administrative failure. It exposes deep legal and institutional weaknesses that continue to protect one of Malawi’s most toxic political cultures: vote-buying disguised as generosity.
Kizito-Tenthani
On paper, Malawi has a strong law. The Political Parties Act clearly bans handouts and defines them in detail. Regulations were even gazetted in 2025 to operationalise the ban. Yet in practice, the system has failed so completely that not a single major case from the 2025 general election has meaningfully progressed to court.
This raises a fundamental question about whether the handouts problem is really about lack of evidence, or about a legal framework that is structurally designed to fail.
Registrar Kizito Tenthani’s explanation rests on weak evidence, fearful witnesses and lack of staff and resources.
While all these are real problems, they point to something deeper. The law places an unrealistic burden of proof on ordinary citizens in a political environment dominated by fear, poverty and power imbalances. Expecting poor villagers to collect court-level evidence against powerful politicians is not just impractical, it is absurd.
In most cases, handouts happen in public at rallies, funerals, football matches and development launches. Everyone sees it and everyone knows it, yet legally it is treated as if it happened in secret. The result is a paradox where handouts are socially visible but legally invisible.
The biggest loophole lies in the design of the institution itself. The Registrar’s office is not properly structured as an investigative body, yet the law assumes it can operate like the police or the Anti-Corruption Bureau. When Tenthani says complainants expected his office to physically investigate, he is admitting a structural failure.
If an institution is given enforcement powers, it must also have investigative capacity. Without that, it becomes a passive office waiting for perfect evidence that will never come. The Registrar is reduced to a filing desk rather than a regulator.
The issue of fearful witnesses is not a moral weakness of citizens but a predictable outcome of Malawi’s political reality. People fear losing access to development projects, fear victimisation by political elites, fear violence, and fear being labelled opposition agents. In such an environment, a law that depends entirely on citizen bravery is unenforceable by design. It assumes political equality in a society where power is deeply unequal.
Out of 172 reported cases, only two are with the Director of Public Prosecutions. This is not enforcement but symbolic compliance. It creates the appearance of legality while preserving impunity. Politicians now know that even if they are reported, nothing serious will happen. That is the most dangerous signal because it trains political actors to treat the law as a public relations exercise rather than a real constraint.
The Registrar now promises to recruit 16 officers, but elections have been held for years without serious investment in the very institution meant to regulate them. This is not accidental. Weak enforcement bodies are politically convenient. Government cannot claim to be serious about clean elections while starving regulators of staff, budget and legal authority.
Behind all these legal failures lies a deeper structural truth. Handouts thrive because poverty is widespread and development is personalised. For many Malawians, elections are the only time politicians bring anything tangible. A bag of maize or a small cash gift becomes a rational economic choice, not corruption. As long as MPs act as personal benefactors instead of policymakers and communities remain excluded from real development, handouts will continue regardless of how many laws are passed.
The real scandal is not that 172 cases were dismissed. The real scandal is that the system was built in such a way that dismissal was almost guaranteed. The Political Parties Act criminalises handouts but provides no strong investigative machinery, no effective witness protection, no automatic administrative sanctions and no serious institutional capacity. It looks tough on paper but is soft in practice.
Malawi has therefore created a legal fiction where handouts are illegal in theory but perfectly safe in reality. Until the law is redesigned to allow proactive investigations, protect whistle-blowers, impose real penalties and remove the burden from ordinary citizens, the handouts culture will remain untouched.
Each dismissed case will not weaken the practice but strengthen it by teaching politicians that in Malawi, corruption is punished only in speeches, not in courts.
