In July 2022, Malawi’s President Lazarus Chakwera made a bold declaration – not against a foreign enemy, but against corruption – the country’s silent assassin. With the rallying cry, “Corruption is our biggest enemy and is not welcome here,” he launched a 20-week anti-corruption campaign, vowing to root out graft from the highest offices to the smallest government desks.
Yet, by 2024, Malawians were left asking: was this a mutiny – or just another act in the political circus? Despite Chakwera’s grand rhetoric, graft remains front-page news. High-profile arrests end in acquittals, billions vanish without a trace, and whistleblowers live in fear.
So, what became of the president’s “War on Corruption”? When Chakwera took office in 2020, he positioned himself as a reformer – an evangelical pastor-turned-politician determined to clear Malawi’s “rubble of corruption”.
Yet corruption’s wreckage still manifests in plain sight. Beneath his grand speeches – often delivered in a tone echoing Martin Luther King Jr – lies a harsher reality: selective justice, political cover-ups, and a system designed to shield the powerful.
Chakwera’s government has been rocked by multiple corruption scandals, each exposing the deep-rooted rot he once vowed to eliminate. Among them: Barkaat Foods, a UK-based meat supplier with no experience in agriculture, secured a $570 million fertiliser contract. The government paid in advance, yet no fertiliser ever arrived.
Local media reports alleged that the contract was deliberately rigged, with funds funnelled into personal accounts linked to Chakwera’s administration officials. His silence only fuelled accusations of complicity, further eroding his claims of transparency.
If Cashgate, the 2013 scandal in which Malawi government funds were embezzled through false financial transactions, was shocking, with $13.7 million siphoned off, the National Oil Company of Malawi (NOCMA) Limited scandal dwarfed it.
In this case, $857 million was funnelled to foreign firms in the UAE that failed to deliver oil. Such deliberate mismanagement shattered the administration’s credibility, exposing the President’s anti-corruption “war” as selective at best.
Meanwhile, corruption cases involving Chakwera’s associates – including his son, former Vice President Saulos Chilima, and ex-President Bakili Muluzi – have been buried, dismissed, or ignored. In contrast, the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) has selectively prosecuted high-profile figures such as former cabinet ministers Cecilia Chazama, Nicholas Dausi, and Newton Kambala.
The case of ex-police chief George Kainja suggests the ACB acts only when it is politically convenient.
Chakwera insists he strengthened the bureau, yet its independence has only weakened. In 2023, former ACB chief Martha Chizuma admitted that funding cuts had crippled the agency’s ability to prosecute corruption cases.
Prior to that, in December 2022, armed police stormed Chizuma’s home in the dead of night, dragged her from bed, and threw her into a cell. Her crime? A leaked phone call in which she criticised Chakwera’s anti-corruption efforts and exposed interference from former Director of Public Prosecutions Steve Kayuni and certain judges.
The recording derailed her investigations. Once hailed as a fearless enforcer, Chizuma saw her career dismantled the moment she became a liability to those in power. Her contract expired in May 2024.
Indeed, since 1998, the ACB has been hamstrung by weak laws, sluggish reforms, and relentless political meddling. The outdated Corrupt Practices Act limits its ability to prosecute modern financial crimes, while judicial independence remains under constant threat. The ACB has won just 158 out of 425 corruption cases – a conviction rate of less than 40%.
More recently, at the 2025/2026 national budget meeting on February 14 this year, Chakwera touted his support for the ACB, claiming his decision to increase its funding, personnel, and authority had upset some people.
Under Chakwera, however, the ACB has become a political weapon – silencing critics while protecting loyalists. Justice is no longer about accountability, it is about leverage. And it is not just whistleblowers under attack: journalists, too, face harassment, arrest, and even exile.
Investigative reporter Gregory Gondwe learned this first-hand in February last year, when he fled into hiding after military police began hunting for him. His crime? Exposing a $20 million government plan to buy 32 armoured vehicles from a company linked to Malawi-born British businessman Zuneth Sattar – yet another allegedly corrupt procurement scheme.
London’s Financial Times reports that Sattar is being investigated by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) for alleged corruption relating to three public contracts with the Malawi government. He “robustly denies wrongdoing”.
Selective justice is not the exception, it is the rule. In May 2022, prosecutors dropped a corruption case against the former president, Bakili Muluzi, a case that had dragged on for nearly two decades over allegations he siphoned off $11 million in public funds.
A month later, Chakwera pardoned former Minister of Homeland Security Uladi Mussa, convicted of corruption in 2020 and even barred from entering the United States. The pardon, framed as an Easter goodwill gesture, only reinforced the perception that corruption convictions in Malawi are mere inconveniences, easily erased through political manoeuvring.
Each dropped case and overturned conviction makes one thing clear: the fight against corruption is performance, not justice.
“Citizens lose faith in the institutions meant to uphold justice,” said Benedicto Kondowe, chair of the National Advocacy Platform, a local coalition of more than 350 anti-corruption organisations and individuals.
Paradoxically, at the opening of the 2025/26 budget meeting, Chakwera defended his anticorruption record, dismissing accusations against his government: “I am sure my critics were disappointed that my name was absent from UK court documents on corrupt Malawian officials.”
He was referring to a joint investigation by the UK‘s NCA and Malawi’s ACB into the Sattar dealings, which found that more than 80 Malawian officials, including former Vice President Chilima, senior police officers, and procurement officials, had allegedly taken bribes to approve inflated military and police contracts.
Between 2005 and 2019, Malawi lost between $2.26 billion and $7.32 billion to corruption and illicit financial flows, draining resources meant for development and deepening poverty, according to Global Financial Integrity estimates.
Legal scholars James Phiri and Chifundo Ngwira argue in ‘The Effectiveness of Anti-
Corruption Measures in Malawi’ (Malawi Law Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1) that executive interference has not only stalled key corruption cases but also eroded the justice system’s credibility.
In Malawi, political appointees like the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) have constitutional discretionary powers to discontinue criminal proceedings including in corruption cases, before judgment. Thus, legal experts warn that the DPP’s misuse of its power to discontinue cases undermines anticorruption efforts by enabling wrongdoers to evade consequences and fostering a culture of impunity.
“This erodes public trust in the justice system, affecting perceptions of fairness and discouraging investment,” warn Phiri and Ngwira.
As Malawi’s justice system fails to hold the powerful accountable, global anti-corruption initiatives, such as the proposed International Anti- Corruption Court (IACCourt), are gaining traction. Despite pressure from international donors and civil society organisations, Chakwera’s government persistently shields political elites while silencing whistleblowers and investigators.
Professor Gafar Idowu Ayodeji of the Tai Solarin University of Education in Nigeria believes that, to combat grand corruption in sub-Saharan Africa, the proposed IACCourt must be established.
According to Ayodeji, current presidents and other state officials in the region frequently make statements that represent non-institutional anti-corruption policy, which is largely driven by international development aims.
“There are commonalities in the strong rhetorical language such as ‘War on Corruption’, ‘crusade against corruption’, and ‘zero tolerance against corruption’ … they usually assure the public and claim they are committed to the fight, while demeaning the anti-corruption efforts of their predecessors.”
Ayodeji told Africa in Fact, “It is evident that these strategies, whether real or phoney, appear to be ineffective”, adding that such strategies are either not adopted in reality or are never properly implemented.
“The development of many sub-Saharan countries has been hampered by widespread corruption more than in any other part of the world. In fact, corruption is the primary, not the secondary, reason for development failure. Therefore, a unique problem requires an unusual solution, which the establishment of the IACCourt may provide.”
Kondowe agrees with Ayodeji, though he cautions that challenges such as jurisdictional conflicts and political resistance must be addressed for the IACCourt to be effective.
“Despite these hurdles, establishing such a court would be a step toward closing the impunity gap and strengthening global efforts to combat corruption,” Kondowe concluded.
Africa in Fact Magazine, international edition first published this story on May 12th, 2025.
