The mystery of Malawi’s 2nd VP Chihana’s Nairobi trip

There is a particular genre of diplomatic non-story that has become familiar in the age of the Facebook communiqué: two politicians meet, one of them posts a photograph, and the rest of us are left to work out what, if anything, actually happened. Malawi’s Second Vice President, Enoch Kamzingeni Chihana, has just supplied a textbook example.

We know he was in Kenya. We know this because Raila Odinga Jr, son of the veteran Kenyan opposition figure and former prime minister, posted a photograph of the two men in conversation, thanking Chihana “for visiting our great nation Kenya and for another great meeting.”

We do not know why he was there, what was discussed, or whether the trip carries any official standing at all. Neither the Office of the President and Cabinet in Lilongwe nor anyone in Nairobi has troubled to clarify.

This is, admittedly, a minor mystery in the great scheme of regional diplomacy. But it is worth pausing on, because Chihana’s post is an interesting one, and the questions it raises say something about how the office of Second Vice President has been used since its rather pointed revival.

The post itself was resurrected by President Peter Mutharika in October last year, following the 2025 general election, as part of a government of national unity, and handed to Chihana, whose father, Chakufwa Chihana, held the identical title under President Bakili Muluzi.

It is not, constitutionally speaking, a job with sharply defined edges: the holder assists the President with assigned duties, turns up at official functions, and coordinates the odd government programme when asked.

In practice, this has increasingly meant serving as Malawi’s stand-in on the international circuit. In June, Mutharika delegated Chihana to preside over an Extraordinary SADC Organ Troika Summit, a move that civil society groups, rather touchingly, read as evidence of trust and unity at the top of government, as though the alternative interpretations hadn’t occurred to anyone.

Which brings us back to Nairobi. Was this a formal bilateral engagement, the sort that ordinarily comes with a joint statement and a delegation list? Or was it simply two political figures, one the son of a famous father, catching up on the margins of something else entirely, with rather more enthusiasm on Facebook than in any official record?

The Odinga family’s own relationship to formal office is, after all, a complicated one; Raila Jr’s father has spent a career as Kenya’s most durable opposition leader without quite reaching the presidency himself, which makes the optics of the meeting, cordial though they plainly were, a little harder to place within the usual conventions of state visits.

None of this is remotely scandalous. Politicians meet other politicians’ relatives all the time, and not every handshake requires a press release. But there is something quietly instructive in the gap between how much we now learn about diplomacy from a son’s Facebook post and how little we learn from the institutions actually charged with conducting it.

Nyasa Times has, sensibly, asked the Office of the President and Cabinet for details. Whether an answer arrives before the next photograph does is, on current form, an open question.