Lazarus Chakwera came to power in Malawi with a mandate for change and a country ready to believe in it. He left office four years later with a sharper, harder-won understanding of what change actually costs — and who it tends to punish.
In a candid interview on Africanews’ Global Conversation, the former Malawian president reflected on his presidency with the kind of clarity that often only comes after the cameras of high office have been switched off. His central message was direct and unsparing: in Africa, the moment a leader decides to take on corruption, corruption takes on the leader.
“The fight you engage in fights back,” Chakwera said — a line that functions less as a metaphor and more as a field report from a man who lived it.
Chakwera was elected in 2020 on an explicitly anti-corruption, reformist platform, riding a wave of public frustration with entrenched misgovernance. The mandate was clear. The expectations were high. The window for delivery, it turned out, was immediately and relentlessly squeezed. Before his administration could find its footing, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, followed by a succession of natural disasters — cyclones, drought — that hammered an already fragile economy and kept millions of Malawians in a state of sustained precarity.
“Each of the four years I had to declare a state of national disaster,” he said, a single sentence that captures the impossible governing context his administration inherited and never fully escaped.
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Chakwera pushed back firmly against the narrative that his reform agenda simply failed, drawing a distinction that many critics of reformist governments tend to collapse: the difference between reform that is absent and reform that is slow.
Structural change, he argued, operates on a timeline that democratic politics rarely accommodates. Legislating against corruption, building institutional capacity, reshaping systems that have been entrenched for decades — none of it fits into an election cycle. Yet that is precisely the timeframe by which leaders are judged.
“Sometimes politics is transactional,” he said. “People want what happens today.”
It is a tension that has undermined reformist governments across the continent — the gap between what genuine transformation requires and what an impatient, economically pressured public is willing to wait for. Chakwera did not present this as an excuse. He presented it as a structural reality that any serious conversation about African governance must grapple with.
One of the more striking moments in the interview came when Chakwera addressed the political cost of doing things by the book. Delays in appointing a director to Malawi’s Anti-Corruption Bureau drew public criticism during his tenure — but he attributed those delays not to negligence or political interference, but to his decision to follow judicial processes strictly and wait out legal challenges through proper channels.
His conclusion was quietly devastating: “Sticking to the rule of law can punish you as well.”
It is the kind of observation that only makes sense from the inside — a reminder that in environments where institutions are weak and expectations are shaped by decades of shortcuts, a leader who insists on due process can appear, paradoxically, to be doing less than one who simply acts.
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Chakwera was careful to situate his experience not as a uniquely Malawian story but as a reflection of what reformist leaders across Africa consistently face: entrenched systems that resist change, political economies that reward the status quo, and publics caught between legitimate frustration and the slow machinery of institutional reform.
“Change is a process,” he said. “No matter how good the laws are, it depends on who implements them.”
It is perhaps the most honest summary of Africa’s governance challenge — not a deficit of good legislation, but a persistent gap between what the law says and what power actually does.
Despite losing his re-election bid, Chakwera pointed to something he clearly regards as a genuine achievement: Malawi’s peaceful vote and the orderly transfer of power that followed. In a continent where elections too often become flashpoints for instability, he described it as proof that credible democratic transitions remain possible — even under pressure, even in difficult circumstances.
Now leading the opposition Malawi Congress Party, he has not stepped away from public life. His focus, he says, is on rebuilding trust and strengthening party structures — the slower, less visible work that political renewal actually requires.
For a man who once held the presidency, it is a humbler stage. But Chakwera seems to understand, perhaps better than most, that the fight for reform does not end when the fight pushes back. It just changes shape.
Credit: euronews