Chakwera’s account of the day Chilima died no longer adds up
There is a version of events from 10 June 2024 that Malawians have been asked to accept for over a year: that a plane went missing, that confusion reigned, that a government did its best amid the chaos of an unfolding tragedy.
Testimony now emerging before Parliament’s ad hoc committee investigating the Chikangawa crash suggests that version deserves rather more scrutiny than it has so far received — and increasingly, so does the man who delivered it.
Colleen Zamba, who served as Secretary to the President and Cabinet at the time, told the committee she went to State House at 2pm that day, accompanied by the Army Commander and the Inspector General of Police, to brief then-President Lazarus Chakwera on the fate of the aircraft carrying his own Vice-President, Saulos Chilima.
Chakwera, she said, listened intently. Pressed on whether he appeared shocked, or whether he seemed to already know, Zamba said she could not say either way.
That studied uncertainty sits awkwardly alongside the emerging timeline.
Earlier testimony to the same committee established that Chakwera had received a call at 10:35am informing him that Chilima’s aircraft was missing — some three and a half hours before Zamba’s briefing.
According to the German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation’s report, formal rescue operations were already underway by 11:30am.
By 2pm, then, Zamba was apparently delivering news to a president who, on the government’s own account, had known for hours.
A demeanour of calm, attentive listening under those circumstances invites the obvious question the committee now appears unwilling to let go unasked.
Committee chairperson Walter Nyamilandu has confirmed that Chakwera himself could be summoned when the inquiry enters its third phase in October.
This is not a small development. Parliamentary committees do not lightly contemplate calling former heads of state, and the fact that this one is doing so reflects the scale of the discrepancies that have accumulated around Chakwera’s public account of the crash.
Those discrepancies are, on their own, substantial. In his first national address after the aircraft’s disappearance, Chakwera told Malawians that ten people were on board; nine were later confirmed to have died.
He said the plane had failed to land in Mzuzu because of bad weather; subsequent evidence established that it never reached Mzuzu at all.
He publicly disputed reports that the search operation had been suspended overnight; witnesses have since testified that it was suspended and resumed only the next morning.
None of this, taken in isolation, proves concealment. Crises produce confusion, and early government statements in the immediate aftermath of a disaster are rarely perfectly accurate.
But taken together — the delayed and inconsistent public statements, the apparent gap between what Chakwera knew and when he was seen to react, the repeated corrections to the official narrative — the pattern is no longer easily explained by the ordinary fog of crisis management.
It demands, at minimum, that the person at the centre of it be asked to account for it directly, under the kind of scrutiny a parliamentary committee is designed to provide.
Nyamilandu has signalled the committee does not intend to let the Speaker’s 90-day timeframe force a premature conclusion, citing “emerging issues that are beyond the committee.”
That is a notable admission from an inquiry chair, and it suggests the committee itself recognises it may be approaching questions of accountability that extend well beyond weather radar and cockpit communications — into the conduct of the presidency itself in the hours a nation’s Vice-President was missing, and then confirmed dead.
Malawians were owed a thorough accounting of how Saulos Chilima died. They may now also be owed an accounting of what their president knew, when he knew it, and why the story he told them at the time has proven, in so many particulars, not to hold up.
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