Choosing the Better Devil: Would Chilima Have Stood with MCP or DPP?

As the 2025 election campaign enters its decisive stretch, Malawians are confronted with a cruel irony: yet again, their choice lies between two devils—MCP and DPP.

This year’s election looks set to be a final duel between Peter Mutharika and Lazarus Chakwera, two men who carry the scars of leadership and whose political legacies hang by a thread. For Malawians, it is not so much about choosing vision and principle, but rather about settling for the lesser evil.

And in this grim electoral theatre, a haunting question lingers: if Saulos Chilima were alive today, which side of the divide would he have chosen?

Dining with the DPP Again?

Before his tragic death in June last year, whispers grew louder that Chilima might have been considering a political reconciliation with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Some of his close aides floated the idea that a UTM–DPP pact was not beyond imagination.

But would Chilima, the man who dramatically broke ranks with DPP in 2018, have stomached a return to the very party he had denounced as rotten to the core?

This was the same DPP that presided over Malawi’s darkest political chapters—corruption cartels thriving unchecked, hospitals collapsing without medicines, and police officers raping women and girls in Msundwe while enjoying political protection.

The same DPP whose cadres freely roamed the streets with panga knives, terrorizing citizens. The same DPP that tried to bribe Constitutional Court judges during the 2019 election case. The same DPP that weaponized a compromised Malawi Electoral Commission to rig elections against the will of the people.

Would Chilima—who once declared, “I have been vice president for the last four years. I have had no support within to fight corruption, so the best way is to run for the highest office and then take corruption head-on”—really have returned to such a tainted fold?

Unlikely. His 2018 rebellion was not a small quarrel. It was an outright rejection of DPP’s culture of theft, nepotism, and impunity. To go back would have been to commit political suicide and erase everything UTM stood for.

Sticking with MCP: A Bitter Pill?

On the other hand, Chilima’s Tonse Alliance with MCP raised expectations sky-high in 2020. For once, Malawians dared to hope. The manifesto was bold, packed with promises of jobs, reforms, and transformation.

But reality hit hard.

The Chakwera administration has struggled under the weight of a collapsing economy: forex shortages, runaway inflation, fuel crises, and unrelenting corruption scandals. For many, Tonse’s “Canaan” turned into a desert of broken promises.

To make matters worse, many of the policies Chilima himself championed—youth empowerment, public service reform, economic innovation—were left to gather dust. MCP, despite inheriting them, failed to deliver.

The result? A government that looks weak, indecisive, and out of touch. Chakwera’s leadership is increasingly viewed as cautious to the point of paralysis. For a man of Chilima’s energy, decisiveness, and impatience for results, this would have been intolerable.

Yes, MCP might look like the “better devil” compared to DPP. But would Chilima have settled for mere survival politics, tied to a slow and indecisive government that squandered the people’s trust?

The Rock and the Hard Place

The truth is brutal: both MCP and DPP have failed Malawians. Both remain tribal machines without clear ideological depth. Both recycle old faces with no transformative vision. Both offer more of the same.

That is why Chilima was different. He symbolized a break from the tired politics of entitlement and mediocrity. He embodied passion, bravery, and accountability. He was a reformist with charisma, vision, and the oratory skills to inspire hope.

Had he lived, Chilima would have been forced into a cruel dilemma—align with MCP, where his ideas were diluted and ignored, or crawl back to DPP, whose sins he had once condemned.

Either way, it would not have been a choice of conviction, but of survival.

And that is the tragedy of Malawian politics today: citizens are left to choose between two devils, while the one leader who once represented genuine hope and transformation is no longer here to shape their future.

The real question is not whether Chilima would have chosen MCP or DPP. The real question is why Malawians, in 2025, are still left with devils to choose from at all.

 

Follow and Subscribe Nyasa TV :
Follow us in Twitter

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *