Chivayo’s charm offensive reaches First Lady: Malawi’s most awkward donor

There is a particular type of donor that any well-run charity ought to fear: the one whose generosity arrives with more baggage than a private jet’s cargo hold. Beautify Malawi, the charity chaired by the country’s first lady, Gertrude Mutharika, appears to have acquired exactly such a benefactor in Wicknell Chivayo, the Zimbabwean businessman whose K1.7 billion (US$1 million) donation has done rather more to draw attention to the charity than its organisers might have wished.

Mr Chivayo, 45, is not a man who does anything quietly. His social media output — private jets, shopping sprees, the full iconography of self-made (or at least self-declared) wealth — has made him one of the more conspicuous figures to emerge from Zimbabwe’s business class since 2024, as he has set about expanding his footprint across the region.

He was, until recently, closely associated with Malawi’s former president Lazarus Chakwera, a relationship that presumably lost some of its utility when Mr Chakwera lost last year’s election. Undeterred, Mr Chivayo has since found his way to a reception with President Peter Mutharika, suggesting either remarkable adaptability or a portfolio approach to political friendship.

His commercial record is, to put it delicately, chequered. A theft conviction dates back to 2004. In 2018 he faced corruption charges relating to a $5.6 million advance his company, Intratrek Zimbabwe, received for a 100-megawatt solar power plant that prosecutors alleged involved the misappropriation of funds.

He was acquitted in March 2023, after the courts determined the underlying contract was valid — a legal vindication, if not quite a reputational one. Mr Chivayo denies any wrongdoing and says his interest in Malawi is straightforwardly commercial: he is there, he insists, for the investment opportunities.

Whatever his intentions, the effect of his million-dollar pledge is to tether a businessman under persistent financial scrutiny to a charity chaired by a sitting first lady — precisely the sort of association that charities with any instinct for self-preservation try to avoid.

A first lady’s charity that accepts money without adequate transparency about its provenance or authorisation is not merely risking its own standing; it risks generating reputational costs that ripple well beyond the charity itself.

And transparency, on the available evidence, is not Beautify Malawi’s strong suit. As long ago as 2021, local journalists found no verifiable confirmation that the organisation was registered with Malawi’s NGO regulator, nor that it appeared on the books of the Council for Non-Governmental Organisations — this despite earlier public statements referring to it as a registered trust.

Since its relaunch, matters have scarcely improved: independent journalists and civil society monitors report being unable to obtain audited accounts, or to confirm the charity’s presence on current NGO Regulatory Authority registration lists.

None of this proves impropriety on anyone’s part.

It is entirely possible that Mr Chivayo’s donation is exactly what he says it is, and that Beautify Malawi’s paperwork troubles amount to nothing more than administrative untidiness. But charities chaired by presidential spouses do not have the luxury of benefit-of-the-doubt scrutiny, particularly when their largest donors come trailing courtroom histories and unresolved questions of their own.

In the absence of audited accounts and confirmed registration, Malawians are left to take rather a lot on faith — not an ideal position for an institution that trades, at least nominally, in public trust.

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