All candidates fail interview for Malawi’s top anti-corruption job

There is a certain grim comedy to the announcement, made almost in passing by the Attorney General, that every single candidate interviewed for the post of Director General of Malawi’s Anti-Corruption Bureau had failed. Not most. Not some, pending further review. All of them.

The search must now begin again — readvertised, reshortlisted, re-interviewed — nearly two years after the bureau’s last substantive head, Martha Chizuma, departed when her term expired in 2024.

One’s first instinct is to ask what kind of institution manages to interview a full slate of candidates for its most senior job and find every last one wanting. Was the field genuinely so thin? Or is something else going on — a process designed, whether by incompetence or intention, to keep producing no result?

Attorney General Frank Mbeta, for his part, would like everyone to relax. “People should not be worried,” he assured the country, before adding, with the breezy confidence of a man who has said this sort of thing before, that the position would be readvertised “by next week.”

He also wanted it understood that there is nothing remotely improper about an anti-corruption bureau being run, indefinitely, by someone who was never actually appointed to run it.

This is, he says, within the law. No doubt it is. But there is a difference — a difference governance types spend entire careers trying to explain to attorneys general — between what is technically lawful and what is institutionally sane.

Benedicto Kondowe, a governance and law expert who has clearly had this argument before, put his finger on the distinction rather neatly: an acting arrangement is meant to bridge a vacancy, not become the vacancy’s permanent architecture.

“An Acting Director General… cannot lawfully become a backdoor substitute for substantive recruitment,” he noted — which is precisely what nearly two years of “acting” leadership begins to resemble, however legal each individual extension may be.

Willy Kambwandira of the Centre for Social Accountability and Transparency was blunter still, arguing that a bureau tasked with investigating the country’s most sensitive corruption cases cannot credibly do so while its own leadership sits in permanent limbo.

There is an obvious irony that seems to have escaped no one except, perhaps, the government: an anti-corruption institution that cannot get its own house in order is not a reassuring sight to a public already exhausted by graft.

None of this is to suggest malevolence. Bureaucratic drift rarely requires a villain; it manages perfectly well on inertia alone.

But two years is a long time for an institution to run on “soon enough,” and the closer one looks at Malawi’s ACB saga, the more it resembles not a search for the right person, but an extended demonstration of an old truth: nothing entrenches temporary arrangements quite so effectively as the absence of anyone with the authority, or the will, to end them.