A renewed inquiry into the 2024 military plane crash that killed former Vice President Saulos Chilima offers Malawi a rare institutional test, but its credibility will depend on independence, forensic rigour, and the political will to act on findings that may implicate the state itself.
By Collins Mtika
When Malawi’s justice minister told parliament this week that the government would reopen the investigation into the military aircraft crash that killed then Vice-President Saulos Klaus Chilima, he framed it as a response to a legitimacy problem: earlier processes, he said, left “gaps and inconsistencies” that had shaken public trust.
The announcement on 24 February comes with political weight. Chilima died on 10 June 2024 in a crash that immediately triggered suspicion, grief, and a scramble by institutions to control the narrative.
Nearly two years later, the decision to reinvestigate has become a referendum on whether Malawi’s state can examine itself, including the military, with independence and forensic seriousness and whether it can act on findings that may point back to the state.
Within hours of the parliamentary statement, Mary Chilima, the late vice president’s widow, posted a brief public message thanking President Peter Mutharika.
The gesture underlined how personal and political the crash remains: what happened on that flight still hangs over Malawi’s public life and over its claims to accountable governance.
Chilima and eight others were travelling on a Malawi Defence Force Dornier 228, bound for Mzuzu and then onwards to a funeral in the lakeshore district of Nkhata Bay.
The aircraft disappeared from communications and was found the next day, destroyed in forested terrain.
Reuters reported at the time that poor visibility prevented the aircraft from landing at Mzuzu, and it was ordered to return to Lilongwe before it went off radar.
The most detailed technical account came from Germany’s Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU), which Malawi invited to investigate under international accident-investigation norms.
Its work concluded that the crash was not the result of mechanical failure; rather, it pointed to a chain of operational decisions in deteriorating weather and, crucially, to deeper institutional weaknesses that made those decisions more likely and the consequences harder to manage.
Reporting in Malawi’s Nation newspaper, which summarised the German findings, described a pattern of adverse-weather flying at low altitude, poor situational awareness and inadequate pre-flight preparation.
But the BFU’s most politically combustible contribution was not simply the finding of pilot error. It was what the report exposed about Malawi’s aviation safety ecosystem and the degree to which military operations sit outside meaningful civilian oversight.
The German investigation catalogued failures that, taken together, read less like a one-off tragedy and more like a system normalising risk.
One issue was search-and-rescue capability. Malawi’s Nation reported that an interim BFU report found the aircraft had no cockpit voice recorder or flight data recorder and that its emergency locator transmitter (ELT) battery had expired in 2004, meaning the system designed to help locate a downed aircraft was compromised.
A separate BFU-related report excerpt notes that GPS data showed the aircraft flying extremely low at points, down to 185 feet above ground level, consistent with “scud running” in marginal weather to stay below cloud.
Another finding cut to the credibility of the state’s own aviation documentation. A Maravi Express account of BFU interim-report findings said navigation aids listed for Mzuzu in official publications had not existed for at least 15 years, a stark example of paper compliance masking operational reality.
And on crew oversight, Maravi Express reported that investigators were unable to find aero-medical certificates valid at the time of the accident, raising questions about how military flight readiness is documented, tracked and enforced.
These are not merely technical details. They are governance details: procurement choices, audit culture, documentation discipline, accountability lines, and whether VIP flights are managed as exceptions to normal safety rules or subjected to stricter ones.
Before the German final report, former President Lazarus Chakwera’s administration established a domestic Commission of Inquiry chaired by High Court judge Jabbar Alide.
The commission ruled out foul play and attributed the crash to weather and human factors.
Yet civil society groups quickly described the process as inadequate. The Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation said the report did not establish much beyond what was already publicly known and criticised it for failing to answer core accountability questions, including who authorised the flight.
The credibility problem worsened when Sylvester Namiwa of the Centre for Democracy and Economic Development Initiatives resigned shortly after his appointment, saying it was “strange” that proceedings would be closed to the public, an early warning that transparency would be contested from inside the process itself.
By late 2024, the commission’s conclusions may have met the state’s immediate need for closure, but they did not settle the public argument.
Instead, they helped entrench it: that Malawi’s institutions could investigate a tragedy but not necessarily investigate power.
Mutharika’s return to office after the September 2025 election created the political opening for a reinvestigation. International reporting at the time recorded his victory at 56.8% and the scale of public discontent with Chakwera’s economic record.
This week, the Nation newspaper reported that the president directed the probe be routed through a parliamentary committee and “bolstered by international aviation accident experts”, a design choice that has already sparked debate over whether parliament is neutral enough or whether a fresh commission under law would be more credible.
The stakes reach beyond party politics. Across the region, military aviation disasters involving senior leaders have repeatedly raised the same uncomfortable questions: what happens when the people who fly the aircraft also control the investigation?
Kenya’s Chief of Defence Forces, General Francis Ogolla, died in a helicopter crash in April 2024, prompting an investigation by the Kenyan military. Ghana’s defence and environment ministers were killed in a military helicopter crash in August 2025, with investigations ongoing.
These are not identical cases, but they share a pattern: ageing fleets, constrained maintenance budgets, and institutional insularity, a toxic combination when military systems carry civilian political authority.
This is where the Chilima reinvestigation becomes an institutional test case, not only for Malawi but for how African states treat military aviation as a governance problem.
In 2025 the International Air Transport Association warned that sub-Saharan Africa lags the global average in implementation of ICAO Standards and Recommended Practices, citing an effective implementation rate of 59.49% across 46 of 48 states, against a global average of 69.16% and a global target of 75%.
ICAO’s own Africa safety reporting has made similar points: the gap is structural, not episodic, and it affects everything from navigation infrastructure to oversight capacity.
In southern Africa, comparisons have become part of the policy conversation. In 2024, Zambia announced it achieved a 73.48% effective implementation score in an ICAO oversight audit.
Zambian reporting later noted a Malawian delegation visited Zambia to benchmark its oversight systems, a tacit admission that Malawi needs institutional strengthening in civil aviation governance.
Meanwhile, ICAO’s Africa safety programme, the AFI Plan, has been updated for the 2025–2030 period, with an explicit focus on capacity building and sustained oversight improvements.
Reopening the probe will not, by itself, restore trust. Credibility will hinge on three things.
Independence. Any process must be insulated from party advantage and from military control of evidence. If parliament leads, it will need visible safeguards: transparent rules of procedure, public reporting timelines, and clearly defined powers to compel testimony and documents.
Forensic integrity. Re-examining evidence is only meaningful if the chain of custody is clear and investigators can access technical materials, logs and records without obstruction.
Consequences. Malawi has had no shortage of recommendations, from improving emergency locator equipment and meteorological services to tightening aircrew certification and flight-risk management.
The question is whether findings will lead to discipline, prosecutions where warranted, and measurable reform, especially inside institutions that rarely face civilian scrutiny.
That is why the Chilima reinvestigation is a rare institutional test. It asks whether a state can investigate not only a crash, but the governance culture that made it possible.
