State Residences Drain Billions as Secret Repairs Keep Mutharika Away From the North

State House has blamed President Peter Mutharika’s failure to visit the Northern Region on yet another crumbling presidential residence—this time Mzuzu State Lodge—raising fresh questions about why Malawi continues pouring billions into State Houses that never seem to be fixed.

Press secretary Cathy Maulidi said Mzuzu State Lodge is in such poor shape that Mutharika cannot stay there. She promised repairs would be done “by month-end”, the same promise Malawians have heard before about Kamuzu Palace in Lilongwe and Sanjika in Blantyre—both also undergoing unexplained “maintenance”.

The President is now confined to Mtunthama State Lodge in Area 3, another taxpayer-funded residence, after initially hopping between his private homes and Sanjika soon after taking office on October 4 2025.

What remains unclear—because State House refuses to say—is how much these repairs are costing. What is clear is that in the 2025/26 budget, State Residences are consuming K15 billion specifically for maintenance out of a staggering K67 billion allocation.

Maulidi yesterday listed a familiar catalogue of “urgent repairs”: a full kitchen replacement, painting, new carpets, new fridges, new TVs, new mini-refrigerators, missing utensils, broken doors and worn-out furniture. Kamuzu and Sanjika palaces, she added, have missing cameras, ICT equipment and yet more fridges and TVs—losses now being reported to law enforcement.

But she declined to disclose the total bill for the renovations or why so much equipment appears to vanish every election cycle.

Budget documents show just how deep the spending goes: K3.5 billion for equipment rehabilitation, K3.1 billion for security fences, K3 billion for works at Kamuzu, Sanjika and Mtunthama, and K5.4 billion for a new office complex at Kamuzu Palace.

Still, none of these massive allocations come with public procurement details, competitive bidding records or independent audits.

Centre for Social Transparency and Accountability executive director Willy Kambwandira says that is not an accident.

“While maintenance is normal, the scale of cost inflation, lack of transparency and secretive procurement processes point to a deliberate strategy to channel public resources into private pockets under the guise of upgrades,” he said. “These projects are rarely audited, never competitively tendered and justified with vague claims of urgent repairs—fertile ground for inflated contracts, patronage and kickbacks.”

Governance expert George Chaima echoed the concern, saying calls for transparency are routinely ignored, even as maintenance budgets balloon every year with no verifiable results.

Meanwhile, Mutharika still cannot travel north because the official residence meant to host him continues undergoing repairs—just like the others, year after year, with no clear end and no clear accounts of how public money is being spent.

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