The Malawi government’s recent decision to move the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA) from the Office of the Vice-President to the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC) has reignited a familiar question in Malawi’s politics: is the shift driven by a need for efficiency, or by underlying factors?
On January 10, 2026, Chief Secretary to the Government Justin Saidi announced that the transfer takes immediate effect.
Disaster management will no longer fall under the Vice-President’s portfolio, but will now report directly to the OPC, a change the government says is aimed at improving coordination and speeding up decision-making during emergencies.
According to the announcement, President Peter Mutharika believes that situating DoDMA at the centre of government will strengthen coordination across ministries and enable faster mobilization of resources. Officials insist the move is purely administrative.
Yet its noted that this is far from the first time disaster management has been shifted between offices.
In 2020, Mutharika removed DoDMA from the Vice-President’s office in a highly politicized context.
That restructuring followed the Constitutional Court’s reinstatement of then-Vice-President Saulos Chilima after the annulment of the disputed 2019 election.
Mutharika claimed Chilima had forfeited the vice presidency by leaving the ruling party and running against him, a position ultimately rejected by the courts.
The result was a short-lived experiment elevating disaster management into a standalone ministry, a move widely viewed as a political workaround rather than a governance reform.
Critics argued the reshuffle was designed to manage rivalry, not enhance public service delivery.
The latest transfer inevitably revives those memories.
While the current administration has not framed the move as a rebuke of the Vice-President, it effectively withdraws a key national function from that office, raising questions about confidence, performance, and accountability.
The government has sought to reassure the public that coordination with district councils and frontline responders will continue uninterrupted.
However, it has offered limited detail on how the new arrangement will function in practice or how it substantively differs from previous structures.
As Malawi faces increasingly frequent climate-related disasters, the stakes are high.
The central question remains whether this shift is a genuine effort to strengthen disaster response, or whether, as in 2020, other considerations are quietly reshaping the architecture of public service, with consequences that may only become clear when the next emergency strikes.
