For centuries, one rule held true in Malawi: If you wanted land, you saw the chief.
From rural villages to peri-urban townships, village heads witnessed land sales, settled boundaries and allocated plots.
Their letters were your title deed. Banks ignored it, but communities respected the arrangement.
That era is ending as the Customary Land Act of2016 has stripped chiefs of control over land in fast-growing cities.
Since it came into force in 2008, the law has reduced them to customary land committee chairpersons with no voting power except to break a tie.
Section 8 makes it unlawful for a traditional leader or any other person to allocate customary land.
So, what do chiefs do now that committees of three women and three men elected by the community manage customary land?
Above such committees are customary land tribunals chaired by a Traditional Authority (TA) with no voting power and district land tribunals led by the most senior TA.
By 2024, government deployed 319 land clerks and 34 land registrars nationwide as secretaries to these committees and tribunals. They now survey and register customary estates.
This arrangement has replaced traditional leaders as the ultimate authority over customary land.
Urban chiefs have become powerless even though
Section 146 of the Constitution and Section 5 of the Local Government Act still require TAs to sit in local councils as non-voting members.
In practice, ward councillors make big decisions and only go to chiefs when donors wants to implement projects in rural areas.
Mpemba, TA Somba, has become a no man’s land.
This confusion affects many peri-urban areas.
A 2023 University of Witwatersrand study found that chiefs in Mpemba still witness land transactions despite the new land laws because the new system is not there yet.
Government and partners piloted the Act in Chikwawa, Phalombe, Nsanje, Nkhotakota, Rumphi, Karonga and Kasungu, sidestepping 21 districts.
By 2025, Blantyre District’s land registrar was registering over 25 000 parcels in TAs Kunthembwe and Chigaru.
Legally, chiefs in Mpemba cannot allocate land. Practically, buyers still go to him because there is no land clerk—an overlap of bureaucracy.
The ministry knows that “some chiefs are still allocating land illegally.
The slow transition allows wealthy Malawians who can afford customary estate grants to become new land grabbers.
When registration costs money for surveys and fees, the poor lag behind.
Chiefs, for all their faults, were accessible. Land clerks are not.
The delay is causing more conflict as the pending policy intensifies competition over land being sold at a high price.
This expels the original occupants, increasing landlessness as they give way to a more opulent society.
The chiefs, desperate to survive and protect their influence, participate in defiant deals.
Recently, authorities at Mpemba Staff Development Institute, now Malawi School of Government’s Blantyre Campus, found private developers demarcating land reserved for institutional houses, claiming that they had bought it from the chief. This is chaos.
Land allocation fees were a major source of chiefs’ income and authority. Without it, they are weakened.
A Blantyre study found a lack of understanding of development plans prevents chiefs from participating in poverty reduction.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Where the State’s land system is absent, town chiefs have emerged—creating “hybrid political order” between custom and modernity.
They provide social order and public goods where councils fail.
In many places, people still take land disputes to these chiefs first.
Up to 80 percent of Malawi’s land is customary and millions of urban Malawians live on it.
If government wants to end chiefly land authority, it must replace it with something that works.
1. Finish the rollout quickly: Every peri-urban TA needs land clerks and functioning committees.
2. Train the chiefs now so that land committees do not become figureheads or revert to the old system.
3. Define chiefs’ role: If chiefs cannot allocate land or vote in councils, who are they? Cultural leaders? Development mobilisers?
As chiefs lose control, are we replacing them with a fair, accessible land system or just creating “no man’s land” where only the wealthy win.
