2025 polls are for DPP to lose
So, Malawi goes to the polls next year; September, to be exact. That is 20 months from now. There is palpable increased political activity in the country. This is a sign that political parties are aware of the impending elections and that time is running out. Hopefully they are doing the needful—meticulously tilling the land, planting the seeds and tending the crops so that come the D-Day, the harvest should be sumptuous.
Suffice to say that most political parties are still in that mode where they are still doing some surveillance on the ground. They are being cautious about their strategies and are keeping them close to their chests, lest they be eavesdropped on and copy-cut or out-rightly stolen.
Of note across the two major political parties, the governing Malawi Congress Party (MCP) and main opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is the need for an elective convention. Such an event will be epoch-making for both of them. While MCP has announced that the party’s convention will be held in August this year, DPP which is still entrapped in hide-and-seek intra-party battles is yet to announce the date for the event.
MCP’s secretary general Eisenhower Mkaka has said all party positions will be up for grabs including the presidency. However, some top party officials have already been endorsing the party’s president Lazarus Chakwera to be the torchbearer for 2025. Mkaka has defended this saying the Republican Constitution provides for freedom of speech and choice to any citizen. Such a statement is not unexpected from a ruling party and is not exclusive to MCP. DPP is toeing the same line. But there is more drama in the latter than the former. And that is what makes the country’s politics all the more interesting.
With an economy cut to the ribbon, next year’s elections are for the DPP to lose. There is no doubt that the governing Tonse Alliance government has done development across the country, especially on road infrastructure. They could have done more but for several militating factors some made-made and others not of their making.
The single most significant man-made factor is the government’s failure to tame corruption. The Tonse leaders were voted into power chiefly because they promised Malawians that they would deal with the vice once and for all. But at best it is fair to say this government has been massaging graft. They started well by putting the right people in place—especially the employment of Martha Chizuma as director general for the graft-busting body, the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB). But a few months down the line, they frustrated her. They wanted her out at all cost. This was clear after ACB started working with the UK’s National Crime Agency on processes of evidence sharing in relation to alleged corrupt crimes involving businessperson Zuneth Sattar who had multibillion kwacha contracts with government.
To date as I write, there is nothing the Tonse government can put its hand on as an achievement in fighting corruption. It, therefore, goes without saying that during the three years Tonse has been in power, the country has continued to lose billions of its scarce resources to the vice.
The other is government’s inability to create the promised one million jobs to tame unemployment especially among the youth. Other factors that have worked against the Tonse government are the Russia-Ukraine war, the Covid-19 pandemic and the back-to-back tropical cyclones: Ana and Gombe in 2021 and 2022, respectively, and Freddy last year. All these have contributed to making life tough for Malawians through rising cost of living, commodity price increases, loss of jobs, loss of lives, damage to property and infrastructure, water contamination and increase in the spread of disease such as cholera, and the millions of hungry souls to be fed by government.
Unfortunately, DPP is in disarray. It is being ripped apart with too much infighting. It therefore can’t capitalise on the problems Malawians are facing—all summed up in the high cost of living, worsened by the 44 percent devaluation of the local currency on November 9 2023. Hopefully the party’s up-coming convention will resolve the current wrangles in the party once and fall all. My prediction, though, is that the elective conference will not completely resolve the DPP problems unless the leader of one faction of the party Kondwani Nankhumwa wins the presidency. If he loses he will still want to appear on the ballot paper in 2025. You can’t take his eyes away from the DPP presidency. This will not be good for the DPP because he will split the party’s votes, however small he may wrestle from it.
