While President Peter Mutharika sees a government halfway to success, the opposition sees a year of failure.
Malawi Congress Party (MCP) publicity secretary Jessie Kabwila has torn into Mutharika’s first-year scorecard, giving his administration just 10 percent and branding it a “disaster”.
The rejection follows Mutharika’s address on Sunday through state broadcaster MBC, in which the President marked one year in power by rating his government 50 percent and citing the freedom Malawians now enjoy, unlike, the recent MCP era when panga-wielding thugs popularly known as “Anyamata azikwanje” terrorised innocent people without facing the law.
But Kabwila, speaking to local media on Monday, said the President had addressed Malawians with “lies.” She argued that Mutharika only took to the airwaves because of public pressure and would otherwise not have done so, accusing him of being busy with private trips while citizens “are suffering in hospitals.”
On the “azikwanje” charge, the MCP spokesperson turned the tables: “Who killed Chasowa and the albinos?” she asked, in an apparent reference to the unresolved killing of student activist Robert Chasowa during a DPP administration and the murders of people with albinism that rocked the country during Mutharika’s previous term.
Kabwila further claimed the government’s focus is limited to food, dismissing the maize stocks the President celebrated. “The maize that they are proud of was necessitated by Chakwera,” she said, crediting former president Lazarus Chakwera’s administration for the grain the DPP is now claiming credit for.
Kabwila, a former minister of higher education, served in the Chakwera administration that Mutharika’s DPP unseated in the September 2025 elections.
