How Chakwera Burned Malawi
In June 2020, Lazarus Chakwera inherited the easiest presidential landing in SADC. By 2025 he had handed Peter Mutharika a country with a worthless currency. The doctor is in the room. The Lombard Gang is still in the corridor.
THE LOMBARD INHERITANCE: There is a clinical condition called "anosognosia." The brain loses ability to perceive its own damage. Patients argue calmly that the paralysed arm still wors. The injury is real. The seeing apparatus is what is disables.
On 22 October 2025, after Malawians removed him from office by 24 percentage points, Lazarus Chakwera confessed on national television. He had been running the country, in his own words, like a headless chicken. He said it as a defence. It was a clinical disclosure. The recognition apparatus came back online three Finance Ministers, two Reserve Bank Governors and K2.8 trillion through the Lombard window too late.
I spent nine days in Malawi this April reading budget speeches, IMF consultations, parliamentary records, and speaking to people on the runway. This piece is the report.
THE INHERITANCE
In June 2020 Chakwera inherited 8% inflation, three months of reserves and an IMF programme in good standing. By 2025: 30% inflation, half a month of reserves, 93% debt to GDP, a kwacha in the bottom decile of global currency performance — sharing the table with Argentina, Lebanon, Venezuela. Hichilema in Lusaka and Mnangagwa in Harare inherited harder SADC positions and recovered. Chakwera inherited the easiest and burned it. The clerical collar was a costume. Behind it: a patronage operator obsessed with prosecuting one private citizen while the kwacha collapsed — Shepherd Bushiri. I tried to figure out where this came from.
THE TARMAC
In a Bushiri wealth masterclass in South Africa I heard a sentence I cannot forget. A currency is held up by what a country produces, what it sells, what it keeps and what it saves. Production. Export. Retention. Savings. Everything else is noise.
In February 2021 his daughter Israella, eight years old, sat on a tarmac at Kamuzu International for six days. An air ambulance to Nairobi waited on the apron. The Director of Public Prosecutions Steven Kayuni personally carried the paperwork grounding her. Chakwera authorised it. They organised a six-day hostage scene on sovereign territory and dressed it as the rule of law. Bushiri could not say this while she was the leverage. I am saying it now. Steven Kayuni is gruesome evil. Lazarus Chakwera, who authorised him, is gruesome evil in a clerical collar.
THE GANG
Chithyola Banda, the BBC Confessor. Wilson Banda, the Drawer Man. Mafuta Mwale, the Chair Warmer. Kayuni, the Tarmac Warden. The headless chicken at the head of the table. The Lombard Gang. Use the term. It puts the heat where it belongs.
THE DOCTOR
This is what Peter Mutharika inherited on the fourth of October. The man Chakwera insisted for five years was unfit had taught international economic law at Washington University in St Louis for four decades, counselled the African Union on continental trade, and in April 2012 buried his brother Bingu at Mphunzi. His task: the inverse of the Gang's. Stop the printing. Let the kwacha trade. Tell the truth about food and fuel before patronage. Cardoso did this in Lagos in 2023 and the parallel premium compressed. Guvamatanga and Mthuli did it in Harare and inflation fell from 95.8% to 3.8%. Year one is not a Singapore. It is a pulse.
THE CORRIDOR
I sat down with President Mutharika. He is exactly the doctor the country needed. The Lombard Gang knows it. That is why they are not finished.
Malawians removed them by 24 points, but the Gang did not lose because the country saw through them — they lost because the country survived them. The first ends a regime. The second only suspends it.
Three are meeting lawyers about challenges to the audits. Two are running cleansing tours through Pretoria, London and Brussels, converting visa stamps into rehabilitation. MCP still holds dozens of parliamentary seats. The judges they appointed remain on the bench. The journalists they funded are drafting the columns that will accuse Mutharika of austerity and vendetta before the kwacha stops bleeding. The first organised run on the kwacha will not come from foreign markets. It will come from accounts inside the country the Gang still controls. They engineer the panic, then blame the doctor for the relapse. They see that Malawi is still breathing, so they turn off the alarms and pray for its cardiac arrest.
Until Next Time, Head Bowed
