Professor Tiyambe Zeleza: “Once Again, Malawians Have Replaced One Old, Corrupt, and Inept Leader with Another.”  

Malawi’s political trajectory underscores the paradox of formal democratic consolidation coexisting with systemic governance collapse.

Today, Malawi’s Electoral Commission announced the results of the presidential election held last week. Once again, the outcome illustrates the paradox of democratic consolidation without substantive change. Arthur Peter Mutharika has returned to State House with 56.8 percent of the vote, sweeping aside the incumbent, Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera, who managed only 33.0 percent. There were seventeen candidates in all, but the contest was really a duel between two men who have both failed the nation before.

On the surface, the process was dignified. Turnout reached an impressive 76.4 percent, proof that Malawians still cherish the ritual of voting. The Electoral Commission conducted itself with care and transparency, ensuring every ballot was counted. By procedural standards, democracy worked. Yet the substance of democracy, the delivery of accountable and transformative governance, remains a dream deferred. And so, beneath these technical successes lies a sobering truth: once again, one old, corrupt, and inept leader is being replaced by another.

Chakwera fell because of arrogance, nepotism, ethnic chauvinism, and economic mismanagement. Inflation soared, fuel and basic commodities disappeared, and ordinary Malawians endured worsening poverty under a government unwilling to listen. Ironically, Mutharika, who now returns, was ejected from power in 2020 for almost identical reasons. Elections thus produce alternation in leadership but not in governance outcomes. This is rotation without renewal.

The late Thandika Mkandawire, Malawi’s greatest political economist, once called this “choiceless democracy.” Since 1994, when Malawians courageously dismantled Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s 30-year dictatorship, the ballot has given us choice without change. Three decades of multiparty politics have consolidated the rituals of democracy, but have failed to generate the institutions or political culture capable of delivering substantive development. The early promise of multiparty democracy has withered into a politics of rotation, where leaders swap places but systems remain broken.

For me, these failures are not abstract. They touch both my personal journey and my generation’s history. I have personally known all of Malawi’s presidents of the multiparty era, except one, and meet with them in private when I visit the country.

In 1994, Bakili Muluzi invited me to join his shadow cabinet before the first multiparty elections, in recognition of my role as one of the leaders of the Malawi Action Committee, a democracy advocacy group in Canada and the United States in the early 1990s. I declined, sensing the compromises ahead. Later, I watched as his government sank into the corruption and cronyism I had feared, confirming that the institutional weaknesses of the state and the stubborn legacies of an unaccountable postcolonial political culture outlasted the excitement of democratic transition.

Later, as an academic in Illinois, I would cross paths with Peter Mutharika when he taught law in Missouri. Lazarus Chakwera was my junior at the University of Malawi, and when he became president I wrote to him within a week, warning against nepotism and urging him to confront corruption boldly. I wrote again in private communications, and joined fellow Malawians in the diaspora in a public appeal in 2022. We were ignored. Today, he exits as a one-term president, undone by the very arrogance and ineptitude we feared.

I have watched these leaders up close, and I have also watched the hopes of ordinary Malawians, my family, friends, and compatriots, repeatedly dashed. I remember the euphoria of 1994, the songs and marches in the streets, the sense that history had turned a corner. But I also remember the early signs of disillusion, when questions arose in villages, towns, and cities about whether democracy meant real improvement in people’s daily lives. Thirty-one years later, that joy has given way to weariness.

There are celebrations today, and there will be more tomorrow and the days after, as Malawians rejoice at Chakwera’s downfall. Yet I cannot share in them fully. The return of Mutharika does not signal transformation, it merely reinstates an order already rejected. This is the essence of Malawi’s democratic paradox, where elections are free and fair yet incapable of altering the structural failures of governance. Until leaders emerge who can break this cycle, who will build institutions that serve rather than exploit, our elections will remain rituals of hope delayed, and democracy will remain a hollow shell.

This is Malawi’s tragedy for which we bear collective responsibility. My generation has failed the country. Our political class has betrayed its trust. And the electorate itself, exhausted and desperate, has too often settled for familiar disappointments. My anguish is both personal and political, born of memory and conviction.

Still, I write not out of despair, but from a longing for the future we once imagined in the darkest days of Banda’s dictatorship, and before that across generations of resistance against colonialism.

We owe it to that history to still believe such a future is possible. For as long as memory endures, so too does the duty to dream of a Malawi that finally fulfills its democratic and development promise.

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Professor Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is a distinguished Malawian historian, scholar, author, and academic administrator. Known for his expertise in African economic and intellectual history, he has held numerous leadership positions in higher education in Africa, Canada, and the United States