Hyenas at the gates: Colleen Zamba the victim of an angry cartel
There is a temptation, in the telling of Colleen Zamba’s story, to reduce her to a symbol of every failure in Malawi. To make her the face of every fuel queue, every grounded ambulance, every rotting tomato. But the heart of the matter is simpler: Zamba is a woman trying to steer through an impossible web of politics, expectations, and inherited dysfunction.
Take one example. A headline in the Nyasa Times declared: ‘Colleen Zamba: The Corrupt-in-Chief, Top Civil Servant Who Brought Malawi to Its Knees.’ The article claimed that every shortage, every fare hike, every broken system “points to Zamba.”
This has been the shape of the attacks since her first day in office. They turn her into a caricature, an easy punchline. But beneath the ridicule lies calculation. These stories are not only about blame; they are about forcing her out.
When President Lazarus Chakwera swore her in, he warned her openly. The post of Secretary to the President and Cabinet, he said, demands courage—the courage to change a culture that many prefer to keep untouched. He predicted that praise would turn to fury once reforms began to cut against entrenched interests. His warning has proved prophetic.
Critique of leadership is fair, even necessary. But it is another thing to assign a nation’s suffering to one individual, particularly when evidence is contested, contracts are opaque, and powerful players—politicians, bureaucrats, foreign actors—have every reason to shift blame. In the rush to narrative, facts become whispers, motives become accusations, and the complexities of governance disappear.
Zamba now faces allegations of fraud and sabotage as her enemies step up their campaign, using paid media articles to suggest corruption and imply—falsely—that the president’s comments about sabotage were directed at her because she’s NOCMA’s board chair. But this shouldn’t surprise anyone. By now, the tune is familiar. We have been here before. The question is: who benefits from telling the story in exactly this way? Jealous rivals, threatened contractors, and entrenched cartels all have a stake in her downfall. It is easy to cast a woman in authority as the villain. It is harder to hold a broken system to account. After all these lies fail, she will be accused of witchcraft.
The truth is that no Secretary to the Cabinet governs alone. Systems fail because they are already broken. They were broken before Zamba and, without deeper reform, they will be broken after her. To pretend otherwise is to trade complexity for scapegoating. Policies falter, contracts collapse, fuel runs short, economies stumble. These pressures are larger than any one official. Yet the drumbeat of criticism insists that she alone is to blame.
What has followed reeks of an old reflex: drag the woman to the square, throw every stone at hand, and hope the dust hides your own sins. Zamba is being dragged not for crimes proven, but for daring to hold power others covet. The din you hear is not justice. It is the cracking of hyenas thirsting for her blood.
To defend Zamba, in this case, is not to claim she is beyond error. It is to insist on fairness. If she has failed, let the record speak plainly. But until then, the chorus of ridicule tells us less about her shortcomings than it does about those who fear what she represents: a woman who tightened loose ends others were content to leave undone.