From phantom classrooms to rigged tenders, this investigation exposes how procurement capture inside Mzuzu City Council converts public money into private gain, leaving Malawi’s communities trapped between official reform rhetoric and lived reality.
Across Malawi, polished development plans often conceal a harsher truth: local Councils hollowed out by procurement cartels and political insiders.
The result is not just wasted money but also stalled classrooms, broken roads, and public trust worn thin.
In Malawi’s second-largest city, transparency is more slogan than practice. City officials have long marketed Mzuzu City Council’s procurement system as a model of open tendering.
Beneath the gloss, however, it has evolved into a discreet engine for collusion, phantom projects, and the systematic theft of public funds.
City authorities strongly dispute this account.
In written responses to the Centre for Investigative Journalism Malawi (CIJM), Mzuzu City Council Chief Executive Officer Gomezgani Nyasulu insists that no major procurement irregularities have been detected under his administration and that the Council’s recent record is clean.
He says that in the past 24 months, no tenders have been flagged by the Public Procurement and Disposal of Assets Authority (PPDA), and that between 2020 and 2024, no Council officers were investigated, suspended, dismissed, or prosecuted for procurement-related offences.
But even as the Council declares itself compliant, the Council admits it is lagging on core transparency reforms that regulators now consider non-negotiable.
In June 2024, Council Spokesperson Macdonald Gondwe announced with fanfare that the Council had adopted open tendering and ad hoc evaluation teams for major infrastructure projects, including six bridges and culverts worth billions of kwacha.
The language suggested reform. According to contractors, auditors, and residents, speaking independently of one another, the reality looked very different.
For more than a decade, Mzuzu City Council’s procurement has been captured by political interests, manipulated by insiders, and exploited by unqualified but well-connected contractors.
Criminal investigations, donor pressure, and repeated audit warnings have dented reputations, but they have barely altered the machinery beneath.
On the northern edge of Mzuzu, in Chiputula and Katoto, schoolchildren can point to the exact spots where classrooms were meant to stand.
They gesture at empty plots choked with weeds, cracked slabs half-buried in soil, and a few rust-coloured bricks scattered like evidence at a crime scene.
Three site visits between August 2023 and March 2024 showed the same thing. No walls. No roof. No sign of life. Only the ghost of a long-abandoned promise.
When asked about delayed classroom blocks in Chiputula, Katoto, and Lupaso, Nyasulu said the council was “not aware of such projects.”
The response has deepened frustration among residents who have waited years for infrastructure that was publicly funded and officially reported as underway.
These bare plots represent more than failed school projects. They expose a deeper, corrosive system hollowing out Malawi’s local governments: one that hides behind tenders, compliance committees, and progress reports but operates as a carefully rehearsed illusion.
Behind the blueprints lie procurement capture, insider networks, doctored bids, inflated budgets, and money that disappears before a single brick is laid.
In 2020, as COVID-19 strained Malawi’s education system, the government released K6.2 billion for emergency school infrastructure nationwide.
Mzuzu City Council received K100 million to construct low-cost classrooms in Chiputula, Katoto, and Lupaso.
Three years later, the Council reported the projects were 60% complete. Physical inspections found something closer to 20%.
The paperwork raised further red flags: duplicated vouchers for brick suppliers, unsupported labour payments, inflated bills of quantities, and missing invoices for key materials.
The money had moved. The classrooms had not.
The Council maintains that its procurement processes complied with the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Act of 2017, which mandates open competition and oversight by Internal Procurement and Asset Disposal Committees (IPDCs).
Formally, these committees safeguard integrity. Functionally, insiders describe them as ceremonial bodies that rubber-stamp decisions already taken by senior officials.
Nyasulu says his administration has tried to address these weaknesses following the prosecution of former Chief Executive Officer Samson Moris Chirwa, who was later convicted on corruption-related charges.
He points to the creation of an Institutional Integrity Committee tasked with coordinating anti-corruption efforts and investigating misconduct, alongside efforts to strengthen the IPDC and the Internal Audit Section.
Still, the Council concedes it does not keep a publicly accessible register of disciplinary or administrative actions against officials implicated in procurement or financial misconduct.
Nyasulu argues this is because there have been no such cases in recent years and says the Council is unaware of any disciplinary decisions blocked or overturned due to political interference.
More significant gaps remain.
Nyasulu acknowledges that the Council has not yet complied with a key requirement under the 2025 PPDA reforms: disclosure and verification of beneficial ownership for major contracts.
As a result, the Council has no verified list of who ultimately owns or controls the companies winning its tenders.
He explains that earlier procurement rules did not require such disclosures and that the obligation was introduced only recently.
The Council is also not yet using the PPDA-mandated e-procurement platform, another pillar of post-scandal reform.
Implementation, Nyasulu says, has been delayed pending training of the IPDC, scheduled for late 2025, with full rollout to follow.
These admissions sit uneasily alongside official claims of clean procurement. Beneficial-ownership disclosure and e-procurement are designed to expose exactly the contractor networks and political interests that have long dominated council tenders.
Without them, reform remains aspirational.
Between 2021 and 2024, tender evaluations were conducted by ad hoc teams dominated by administrative staff with limited engineering or project-management expertise, Council insiders alleged.
A World Bank procurement assessment warned that such gaps create “dependency on Council officials with potential vested interests.” The referee, in effect, reports to the player.
Opaque procurement did not shrink; it expanded.
Between 2024 and 2025, Mzuzu City Council advertised contracts worth billions of kwacha, including major road upgrades and more than K100 million in gravelling projects across almost every ward.
Contractors told CIJM that evaluation criteria shifted mid-process, interviews were improvised, and awards ignored technical logic. Winning firms, including Shalom Investment and Jags Civil Engineering, were announced without published justifications or proof of qualifications, according to tender documents and contractor accounts.
Even the National Construction Industry Council (NCIC), tasked with licensing contractors, has struggled to enforce standards.
Its 2024 stop-order against Inka Construction for operating while unregistered exposed a broader pattern: unqualified but politically connected firms routinely win public contracts.
The pattern dates back years. In 2011, the Council awarded a K65 million contract for concrete street-light poles to two small firms at prices far above national averages.
The poles were substandard. The money was not. A former council official calls it “the beginning of the modern tender cartel”.
Corruption also thrives in routine transactions. In 2025, two officials allegedly tipped off Suhana Continental Bakery about an upcoming labour inspection, allowing the company to avoid penalties.
Market enforcement officers describe a protection economy in which vendors pay regular bribes to evade bylaws. These daily leakages drain council revenue and deepen financial dependence.
“We started selling assets to survive,” recalls a former council officer. Audit reports from 2016 to 2022 show chronic revenue losses that forced the city to sell municipal land below market value to pay salaries.
In the 2022–2023 financial year, the Infrastructure Development Fund was expected to deliver K3.2 billion in road works. Only K461 million was spent.
The Council has not accounted for the remaining K2.7 billion.
Nyasulu says that since 2022 the city has not faced donor funding suspensions or additional procurement-related conditions, while noting that the fallout from the alleged K6.2-billion COVID-19 scandal affected institutions nationwide.
Public trust, however, remains fragile. Nyasulu acknowledges that confidence in the council has been described as “near zero”, but says efforts are underway to rebuild credibility through community meetings, press briefings, site tours, and engagement during budget formulation.
Project updates, he says, are shared via online platforms and community forums.
When projects stall or fail, the Council says it relies on local structures to explain delays, cost overruns, or implementation problems, insisting these mechanisms are active.
Mzuzu is not an outlier; it is a symptom. A World Bank review found mismanagement of K1.3 billion across northern-region councils between 2021 and 2023.
By mid-2025, 15 of Malawi’s 23 Councils had been instructed to refund misused funds. The National Local Government Finance Committee later admitted it could not trace the source of the repayments.
The scale of the crisis is stark. The March 2023 National Audit Office report found K5.9 billion unaccounted for across local councils in a single year.
Oversight bodies remain overstretched. Even the Anti-Corruption Bureau has acknowledged it lacks qualified engineers to properly assess construction projects.
Legal reforms are meant to close these gaps. The 2025 amendment to the PPDA Act introduced beneficial-ownership rules, stronger audits, and mandatory disclosures.
At the national level, enforcement has shown results, including sanctions against the Greenbelt Authority in 2024. At the local level, capacity constraints and political protection continue to blunt implementation.
In Chiputula, the consequences are immediate. A Standard 8 teacher teaches 137 pupils in one classroom.
“We were told COVID money would bring us classrooms,” she says. “We are still waiting.”
Pupils prepare for exams in overcrowded, poorly ventilated rooms while their promised classrooms remain shallow foundations hidden by weeds.
The Council says it is implementing K5.3 billion worth of infrastructure projects as of October 2025.
Spot checks confirm some road grading and drainage works. But in a system marked by duplicated vouchers, inflated budgets, and missing invoices, even visible progress no longer guarantees integrity.
Civil Society groups are demanding accountability. Mervin Nxumayo, of the Young Human Rights Defenders Network, is blunt: “We know who syphoned the money. We will hold vigils until they are named.”
Activists, however, face delayed access to tender documents, weak whistle-blower protections, and councils skilled at bureaucratic evasion.
Taken together, the Council’s responses and the evidence on the ground describe an institution that claims to have learnt from past scandals but remains behind on the transparency tools regulators now see as essential.
Registers, platforms, audits, and disclosures exist on paper. Verifiable openness does not.
The 2025 PPDA Act provides the scaffolding for a cleaner system. But scaffolding does not build a house.
In Chiputula, children still walk past their ghost classrooms, education suspended between a blueprint and a lie. That gap, between promise and delivery, is where Malawi’s local-level corruption thrives. It is also where the fight for accountability must begin.
