Sept 16 2025 closing in too fast for MCP

Although the dye is cast for all the leading political parties in the country regarding their elective conventions, I bet the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) would want September 16 2025 to come a little later. Specifically the circumstances surrounding the death of former vice-president Saulos Klaus Chilima seem to have torpedoed quite a few plans for the party in government.

MCP and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) have set August 8 to 12 and August 17 and 18, respectively, as the dates for their indabas. UTM Party, on the other hand, is still very much out of commission following the death of its president Chilima in a plane crash on June 10 2024 in Chikangawa Forest. The accident also claimed the lives of eight other people. It has been one month and three days since Chilima died and the party is only now beginning to ponder life without their its charismatic leader.

While DPP now seems firmly on course for September 16 2025, and even bolstered by the recent events, my gut feeling is that MCP would rather wish September 16 2025 came a little later following Chilima’s passing.

MCP and DPP national executive committees (NECs) have made no secret of who they want to put up for their parties’ top positions. But it is in UTM where there will be real battle for the party presidency. As this page went to press on Thursday the party had announced that its NEC would meet yesterday to start talking about a UTM without its founding leader. The party looks so polarised in terms of who to put in the driving seat with some cadres and supporters even suggesting that it should look outside its confines for a successor.

The next two months, therefore, promise to be spellbinding in terms of what direction the party will take. Suffice to say that its vice-president Michael Usi who replaced Chilima as State Vice-President, has a lot of fence-mending and juggling to do if he is to make an impression on the party. For example, it is no brainer that the absence of the party’s secretary general Patricia Kaliati and other senior cadres at his swearing-in ceremony at Parliament Building last month meant he had not gone to government with his party’s full blessings.

But all said, if UTM Party persists as one entity, it should remain an attractive potential bride that both MCP and DPP would only ignore to propose to ahead of September 16 2025 at their own peril. How UTM Party plays its cards between now and the polls is, therefore, crucial for its consolidation.

Ordinarily, as the party in government, MCP would have been in a pole position to use its incumbency advantage and sell its candidate President Lazarus Chakwera with wanton abandon. But so far with the economy going south, prices of basic commodities sky-rocketing by the day, and the cost of living unbearable, convincing the wananchi why the party must be retained in government next year, while doable, is like climbing a cliff with loads of baggage on your back.

Chilima died just when MCP seemed to be beginning to piece together its tattered relationship with its main Tonse Alliance partner UTM. The Director of Public Prosecutions dropping all Zuneth Sattar-related corruption charges against Chilima and Chakwera’s ban on delegation of duties on his vice lifted, it was no rocket science for Malawians to know that the country’s two top gurus were definitely up to something. But Chilima’s death has changed all those plans.

The perception among UTM sympathisers and fans alike—which has been hard to change—is that the plane crash in which SKC died was accidentalised, reminiscent of the infamous Mwanza Four accident. Three Cabinet ministers and a member of Parliament died mysteriously on May 18 in 1983 under the one party MCP regime. They were Dick Matenje, Aaron Gadama and Twaibu Sangala as well as legislator David Chiwanga. There was strong evidence that the four politicians were brutally murdered. Former president Kamuzu Banda, his most loyal follower John Z.U. Tembo and four others were prosecuted for the murders on the accusation of conspiring to murder the four politicians and to destroy relevant evidence. But they were all acquitted. 

The nation is now waiting with baited breath to know the cause of the plane crash. German engineers from the manufacturers of the ill-fated Dornier aircraft concluded their investigations on the plane crash last week and presented their report to Chilima family. The preliminary report does not suggest any foul play in how the nine passengers in the plane died. But there are now more catcalls to release a report on or investigate what caused the aircraft to crash; or indeed, why Malawi Defence Force deployed an old aircraft purchased in 1988 for the Vice-President to use on that trip.

All said, it does not look good for MCP and government who have a gargantuan task to clear the deep perception among UTM followers that the plane crash was the work of foul play. It is my conclusion that the party in government would rather wish September 16 2025 when Malawi goes to the polls came a little later for the festering wounds to heal.