The Rejected Stone: The Making and Remaking of Jane Ansah

There is a strange symmetry in the way time redeems its outcasts. In the country’s political landscape, the unforgiving story of Justice Dr. Jane Ansah unfolds like an allegory about the speed of opinion, the memory of scandal, and the quiet persistence of faith.

Once, she was the most reviled woman in the Republic. Now she sits a heartbeat away from the presidency. It is, as scripture has it, the story of a stone once rejected that has become the cornerstone.

When President Peter Mutharika stood before the crowd at the Bingu International Convention Centre (BICC) to announce Ansah as his running mate, the nation blinked. Surprise rippled across social media, a sudden storm of disbelief, mockery, memes, and outrage. What, many asked, could he possibly be thinking? But Mutharika’s posture that day was calm and professorial, like a man who knows his students will understand him only when the exam is long over. Vindication is often a slow, delayed event.

The president had been here before. He had seen the assertive independence of Saulos Chilima in 2014 and the quiet obedience of Everton Chimulirenji in 2019. The lessons had been public and painful. The second in command, he seemed to have concluded, must be loyal without being ornamental. In choosing Ansah, a lawyer of formidable intellect and a woman who had already endured public humiliation, Mutharika appeared to be making not a gamble but a statement.

Ansah’s credentials are, by any standard, remarkable. A High Court judge, a Justice of the Supreme Court of Appeal, the country’s first female Attorney General, and the second woman ever to chair the Malawi Electoral Commission. Her career, a long stairway of firsts, was built not on tokenism but on merit, discipline, and faith.

And yet every ascent leaves a shadow.

The election of 2019, blurred and contested, stained by the ghostly presence of correction fluid, cast that shadow across her name. As Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, she became the lightning rod for a nation’s anger. Crowds marched with her face painted on placards. On social media, she was tried, sentenced, and executed a thousand times over. Her explanation that she had not authorised the infamous “tippex” never stood a chance against the noise of the digital mob.

Eventually she withdrew. It was not exile in the legal sense, but a retreat imposed by exhaustion and by the strange cruelty of public memory. Yet even in silence she refused to renounce her version of events.

Time, however, is the most unpredictable of allies. Six years later, the same public that had turned its back on her watched as she was sworn in as Vice President of the Republic of Malawi. The irony was biblical, the transformation complete. The woman once scorned as the villain of a stolen election had become a symbol of endurance and return.

Jane Ansah’s story is more than one of vindication. It is a meditation on the long work of forgiveness and the slow reweaving of one’s reputation against the noise of public scorn. Time edits. The crowd that once jeered grows silent, and the same name that carried the sting of disgrace begins to sound again with respect.

The rejected stone, in its quiet persistence, has at last found its corner.