I have sat with grandmothers who sleep with their shoes on because they were warned that the whole village might come for them.
I have held the hands of grandfathers who no longer speak above a whisper after their names were shouted across a market as proof of witchcraft.
I have stood at graves where the mourners did not cry too loudly because they were afraid that grief would be mistaken for guilt.
We have been here before as a country and we know what it means when we finally decide that enough blood has been spilt.
Since January this year, 16 elderly people have been killed on witchcraft suspicion, according to the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Welfare.
At this pace, we are on track to exceed the 22 deaths recorded across all of 2025.
Sadly, the killings are accelerating.
Yet we know what a crisis looks like because we responded to one.
When our brothers and sisters with albinism were being hunted like game, Malawi chose to condemn that horror without flinching.
The government declared a state of emergency and that single decision pulled resources into police stations running
on empty coffers, brought chiefs and faith leaders into the same room with a mandate to protect, and put the truth on billboards and radio dramas until the national c o nv e r s a t i o n shifted.
The Ma lawi Human Rights Co m m i s s i o n (MHRC) reported that attacks against p er sons wi t h albinism dropped from 84 cases in 2016 to 19 cases in 2019 af ter that coordinated response.
Peopl e who would have been killed are alive today because we refused to wait for normal. We treated it like the crisis it was.
Today, I am walking into villages where senior citizens are afraid to grow older and we are still refusing to call this what it is.
According to the Malawi Network of Older Persons’ Organisations (Manepo), mobs murdered nearly 300 elderly people between January 2016 and April 2026 on suspicion of practicing witchcraft.
The network records between 25 and 30 killings every year, with over 80 documented
cases of physical abuse linked to witchcraft accusations in the last decade alone.
Manepo data show 13 elderly people killed in 2021, fifteen in 2022, some 25 in 2023 and a 68 percent rise in report-ed attacks from 2020 to 2021.
In the first four months of 2026, eleven elderly people were killed—on pace to exceed the 22 deaths recorded last year. By this week, the Ministry of Gen-der, Children and Social Welfare reports that five of the confirmed 16 deaths occurred
in Chikwawa District alone.
In March 2023, Manepo s t a ted tha t none of the 72 witchcraft-related ki l l-ings recorded over the two preceding years had been concluded in court.
Human toll
Behind each statistic is a face.
In December 2023, Eliza Supuni, 78, was bludgeoned to death near Mulanje by three of her own grandsons after witchcraft acc u sat i o ns circulated fol-lowing a relative’s death.
Healthuthorities classified her death as natural, concealing the crime.
In Dowa , Positani Kachipewa of Chikonkha Village was allegedly beaten to death by his own nephew.
These crimes are not committed by strangers in the dark. They are commit-ted by family, by neighbors, in daylight.
Our formal systems are losing the battle and we have a
law being ig-nored—the Older Persons Act of 2024.
A police officer outnumbered by a mob cannot protect a life.
A court two districts away cannot hear a case that never gets opened.
Former Minister of Gender Jean Sendeza disclosed in August 2023 that at least 88 murder cases involving el-derly victims remained unresolved.
Manepo executive director andrew Ka-vala states plainly: “In every instance, police report arrests, but the legal pro-cess then stalls.
“We are repeatedly told that homicide cases are too expensive to prosecute, yet we see other murder trials fast-tracked.”
Tackle impunity
Impunity is the fuel that keeps this fire burning.
Declare a state of emergency to combat mob justice.
On April 5 2024, Parliament passed the Older Persons Act, a landmark piece of legislation that criminalises elder abuse, establishes protection orders and provides monthly grants to persons aged 70 and above.
President Chakwera assented to the Act on May 19 2024 and it came into force on September 16 2024, but its implementation has since been near-zero.
Make the laws work.
