Before the 2025 general election, Thyolo Central legislator Ben Phiri rose in Parliament and fired political warning shots at the then ruling MCP regime, cautioning it against taking Malawians for granted just because it was in power.
As someone whose party tasted victory twice (2009 and 2014) and a painful defeat in 2020, the self-styled “Field Marshal” and DPP director of political affairs reminded MCP that Malawians are never permanently aligned to any political formation, no matter how dominant it appears on the ground or in rhetoric.
That time, arrogance of incumbency was fast creeping in, partly because many inside the party misread the comforting voter registration figures, particularly from the Central Region as a guarantee of Lazarus Chakwera’s re-election. In that atmosphere, the regime’s distance from everyday citizens widened, complaints were dismissed too quickly, policy criticism was treated as hostility and governance seemed more focused on defending corruption and bad decisions.
But Ben Phiri’s speech that day carried the voice of someone who had already experienced the consequences of political overconfidence. Having seen the DPP itself fall from power in 2020, he spoke as a survivor of electoral defeat, not just an opponent of Chakwera’s administration.
“Madam Speaker,” he said in essence, “governments have come and governments have gone for one reason—failing to listen to the voice of the voiceless. And when you stop listening… You begin to lose yourself.”
Then came the sharper warning — almost confessional in tone.
“I know now that we are out of government,” he added, “and I am warning you — because if you don’t listen, it will be the same story we went through in 2020.”
And as fate would have it, MCP lost the government a few months later for refusing to listen to the voices of reason, although Phiri’s warning was never meant for Chakwera and MCP alone. It also echoes uncomfortably within the walls of today’s DPP.
Just like MCP, there are people in DPP for whom the party is simply a convenient vehicle for influence, access and survival regardless of its direction or moral compass. Then there are people like Ben Phiri and many others who invested personal credibility, political reputation and in some cases genuine sacrifice in the belief that the DPP could be redeemed in the eyes of Malawians.
Ben Phiri, for all his bluntness and political combativeness, belongs to this second category. The other day at a DPP press conference while in opposition, he literally acknowledged and issued public apologies for the governance excesses and political missteps that defined the DPP era between 2014 and 2020, openly acknowledging that the party had lost its moral compass during that period. He also promised that a serious process of soul-searching had taken place, and that the current DPP was no longer the same organisation that had been rejected at the polls in 2020.
Again, central to this reassurance was a firm pledge that the era of violent DPP cadets or any tolerance of political intimidation was over. This attempt to distance the DPP from its own difficult history succeeded; in the process, the party regained trust with an electorate that remains deeply sceptical and politically alert.
That is precisely why incidents of violence or assault, including the one allegedly linked to Blantyre City Mayor Isaac Jomo Osman recently, become politically toxic in ways that go far beyond the individuals involved. They risk reopening old wounds and dragging the political imagination back to those darker DPP years, when cadet networks were openly accused of humiliating women in public spaces and unleashing panga knife terror against perceived opponents, sometimes in full view of law enforcement that appeared unwilling to act.
The arrogance that the Local Government and Rural Development Minister cautioned against in MCP is a recurring temptation in Malawian politics, hence DPP must heed his wisdom in Parliament that day.
