MCP split over Chakwera’s future: party flirtation with ‘life leadership’

Malawi’s main opposition Malawi Congress Party (MCP)  is entering a period of internal reckoning that looks set to shape its fortunes well beyond the immediate horizon of the 2030 General Election. At issue is a question that many parties eventually confront but few resolve gracefully: what happens to a defeated leader who does not wish to step aside.

According to multiple sources, the party’s politburo is now visibly split over whether former president Lazarus Chakwera should contest the MCP presidency again, with senior figures within his own inner circle, including his former chief of staff, among those positioning themselves as alternatives.

The word being used inside the party, tellingly, is “frenemies” — a description that captures both the personal proximity and the political distance now opening up between Chakwera and some of those who once served him.

Former secretary general Eisenhower Mkaka, one of the names being floated as a potential successor, has been notably direct in rejecting the idea that any convention obliges the party to hand Chakwera another term, a position that puts him at odds with the camp still actively campaigning on the former president’s behalf.

The dispute is not occurring in the abstract. It is unfolding against the concrete backdrop of grassroots elections the party has been ordered to hold by the High Court, following a May judgment directing MCP to conduct polls for its district and regional committees.

Secretary general Richard Chimwendo Banda has since confirmed, via a memorandum released on 19 September, that elections will proceed for all regional, district, constituency, ward and area committees, encompassing the newly demarcated political regions agreed at a National Executive Committee meeting earlier in September.

What makes these ordinarily administrative elections newly consequential is the succession context surrounding them.

Sources close to Chakwera say his allies are already working to secure preferred candidates within the party’s grassroots structures, a strategy that would, if successful, shape the composition of delegates attending the eventual elective convention, and with it, the outcome of the presidential contest itself.

Interviews with NEC members, district chairpersons and local organisers, including one figure who led a pro-Chakwera strategy session in Kasungu, suggest a party girding itself for a protracted and closely fought internal struggle.

The immediate flashpoint may be the composition of local committees, but the underlying question, whether Chakwera can legally seek another term as MCP president at all, is one the party has yet to resolve, and one that will likely determine how bitter this contest ultimately becomes.