Just before last year’s general election, I argued here that the real question haunting many voters then was never about whether DPP or MCP would triumph, but whether it mattered at all to re-entrust power to either of them. It emerged from lived experience accumulated over time and reinforced by the daily disappointments and frustrations of many Malawians. Chief among these was the prospect of sliding back into familiar failures of widespread corruption, nepotism and cronyism, weak accountability systems, capture of public institutions, abuse of procurement processes, politicisation of the civil service, selective application of justice, erosion of public trust, economic mismanagement, policy inconsistency and the misuse of State power—failures of which both DPP and MCP have, at different times, stood accused, and which once pushed voters to eject these same parties from office.
The other burdens facing 7.2 million registered voters then were high prices of food and other basic commodities, strained livelihoods, scarce foreign exchange, fuel shortages, medicine stock-outs in public hospitals and campaign promises that never materialised. In my view, many voters in the September 16 polls were not moved by the love for Peter Mutharika and his DPP or Lazarus Chakwera and MCP, but by memory, fatigue and a renewed desire for political change. Mutharika’s first-term (2014–2020) left behind enough scars to inspire rejection, while Chakwera’s era (2020–2025) accumulated enough frustration to invite regret.
Between those two emotional anchors, the electorate has swung back and forth in the last two general elections, first ejecting Mutharika in 2020 and later turning away from the indecisive Chakwera in 2025 before opening the door again to Mutharika’s so-called “return to proven leadership”. Today, the discomfort once associated with Chakwera and his arrogant MCP has not disappeared. It has simply changed colour to blue but carries the same bitter aftertaste.
No wonder MCP, UTM, UDF and other opposition actors this week turned their fire on DPP over worsening shortages of fuel, forex and rising commodity prices. The rest is history, but for me, MCP’s media briefing on Wednesday at the party’s national headquarters in Lilongwe stood out most. The party strongly believes the DPP administration is failing to fix the economy.
MCP has recently also bemoaned what many Malawians are witnessing daily—long fuel queues across the country, a weakening Kwacha and rising prices of food, transport and other necessities. In many ways, this mirrors the same political messaging once used against MCP during the last campaign when DPP folks displayed everyday goods such as soap and cooking oil as symbols of how unaffordable life had become for ordinary Malawians under Chakwera’s leadership. However, many of the challenges MCP highlighted on Wednesday did not start with this administration.
Most of them took shape during Chakwera’s time in office. In other words, what we are seeing now is but a continuation of old problems raised by the same people in MCP who once had the responsibility to fix them. MCP got a second chance to govern in 2020, and for five years, they couldn’t fix the economy.
Instead, pressure on citizens intensified through the same problems—rising inflation, persistent fuel and forex shortages, high cost of living and shrinking purchasing power. This is why MCP’s current posture raises a deeper question on whether the party is offering a fresh diagnosis of Malawi’s structural problems, or simply reoccupying the familiar role of opposition commentator as they view the system from the outside rather than the inside. In my view, MCP has no moral authority to criticise the DPP or to appear to offer solutions to the key challenges facing the country today, save for its democratic right to do so as the government-in-waiting.
In the last five years, this party was arrogant and refused to sufficiently respond to the very signals Malawians were sending. MCP can not convincingly present itself as the corrective voice just because it lost that power. That mandate expired last year. And if DPP is not careful, it risks repeating the same cycle.