Category: Political Economy

Follow the dollar, not just the exchange rate. Malawi’s forex debate is almost entirely about how many dollars come in. This article asks a second question: how many leave unnecessarily on the journey between a foreign refinery and a Malawian pump? The first article in this series argued that the fuel queues are the child…

The queue is the symptom. Malawi’s fuel queues aren’t a weather event that blew in from the global oil market. They are the visible end of a foreign exchange crisis that has run, in one form or another, for more than six years. Stand at a filling station in Mzuzu, Area 47 in Lilongwe, or…

1. The argument Between 2015 and 2025 the World Bank alone committed more than US$420 million to four operations whose names promised recovery and resilience: the Malawi Floods Emergency Recovery Project (MFERP, US$80 million, 2015–2019), the Malawi Drought Recovery and Resilience Project (MDRRP, US$104 million, 2016), its US$80 million additional financing which renamed it the…

When the Malawi Women’s National Football Team-the Scorchers walked onto the pitch at the Moulay El Hassan Stadium in Rabat for the final of the 2026 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, they were ranked 153rd in the world and had never before qualified for the tournament. They left Morocco with a silver medal, a place…

Education, Traditional Authority, minority economic advantage and urban wealth, and how social networks convert one into another. Abstract Entry into the Malawian elite is conventionally mapped onto four pathways: formal education, traditional authority, the economic advantage of a commercial minority, and the accumulation of urban wealth. This paper argues that in Malawi, these are not…

At BICC, the ritual is always the same. Somewhere between the cake and the send-off, the master of ceremonies calls out the wedding committees by name, and the envelopes come forward, clan by clan, workmate table by workmate table, church group by church group, each contribution counted, sometimes announced aloud, sometimes tallied on a chart…

My first engagement as an audit trainee with KPMG (now Grant Thornton) was a bank reconciliation. Not a system, not a policy-a reconciliation. My supervisor sat with me until every tambala tied out, and when one didn’t, we did not move on. We stayed with it until we knew whether it was a timing difference,…

On 15 July 2026, Parliament’s Committee on Natural Resources, sitting jointly with the Agriculture and Trade and Investment Committees, heard testimony from Dr Napoleon Dzombe, founder and Managing Director of Mtalimanja Holdings, on why his Mulalo Granular Fertiliser Production Factory in Dowa was still not operating (Nyasa Times, 2026a; Malawi Voice, 2026). Dzombe told MPs…

An incident that answers a policy question. On 12 July 2026, a Tanzanian-flagged vessel carrying coal docked at Monkey Bay jetty without the two days’ advance notice required of arriving vessels (Malawi Voice, 2026). Malawi Lake Services was not informed; the marine officer on duty denied it permission to proceed further and ordered the captain…

Introduction Between 1979 and 1980, China moved from a set of loose exhortations on family size to a nationally enforced rule limiting most couples to a single child. The policy remained in force, with regional variation and periodic relaxation, until it was formally ended in 2016. It is frequently cited, correctly, as one of the…