Arithmetic of a Malawian recovery: Mutharika has tamed inflation, cheapened maize – Nobody has told the petrol pump

There is an old rule of politics that voters do not judge governments on rates of change. They judge them on prices. By that standard, President Peter Mutharika’s first year looks rather less impressive than his officials would like.

The government’s best exhibit is inflation, which fell from about 29 per cent in October 2025 to 20 per cent this August.

Maize, the staple on which most Malawians live or go hungry, now sells at around K42,000 a bag, against more than K80,000 in many markets last year. Nation on Sunday, whose one-year review supplies most of the figures here, credits imports and market interventions.

But disinflation is not deflation. It means prices are rising more slowly, not that they have come down. Petrol has gone from K3,499 a litre to K5,619 in under a year, an increase of 61 per cent.

Diesel has risen 68 per cent, from K3,500 to K5,863. Queues are creeping back.

Egenco figures show available generation of 370MW against peak demand of roughly 452MW, with nearly 67MW lost to load-shedding.

Those who can afford to are buying their way out. Some small businesses told the paper they spend as much as K450,000 a month on generators just to stay open. Those who cannot go hungry: 1.9 million Malawians are food insecure, a number expected to reach 2.6 million in the lean season.

The deeper problem is growth. The economy is expanding by an estimated 2.8 per cent, which the paper says leaves income per head flat.

The Democratic Progressive Party promised 6.5 per cent from 2028 to 2030, and getting from here to there will take some doing. Debt servicing swallows about a quarter of the budget. And the Treasury has yet to account for the K500 billion in savings it promised for 2026.

The economist Milward Tobias put it without ornament: “There is no economic recovery yet.”

Mutharika ran as the man who knew how to run things. A year in, he has shown he can stop the bleeding. What he has not shown is that he can heal the patient, and Malawians, who are paying more for almost everything, are unlikely to wait very long for the answer.