By Suleman Chitera
As police cells fill with senior figures from the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), President Lazarus Chakwera is reportedly away on an overseas holiday—detached, distant, and conspicuously silent.
While MCP Secretary General Richard Chimwendo Banda’s office reels, while Vitumbiko Mumba and Jessie Kabwila spend nights behind bars, and while party loyalists whisper about who might be next, the President has chosen departure over presence. Leadership over leisure? Solidarity over self-preservation? These are the questions now echoing across the country.
This is not a minor storm. These are not fringe actors. These are Chakwera’s cabinet ministers, his right-hand men and women—the architects and foot soldiers of his administration. Yet as police drag them through interrogations and lockups, the President offers no public reassurance, no firm condemnation of selective enforcement, no visible gesture of unity. No cancellation of foreign travel. No address to the nation. Just absence.
Malawians are asking: Why now? Why leave?
If the arrests are lawful and justified, why not stand firm at home and explain?
If they are politically motivated or heavy-handed, why not return and defend the very people who defended you?
The optics are devastating. A President elected on promises of servant leadership now appears insulated from the pain of his own camp. At a moment when his party is bleeding, he is boarding planes. At a moment demanding moral courage, he offers diplomatic distance.
This silence feeds a darker suspicion—that Chakwera is either unable or unwilling to confront the machinery now consuming his allies. Or worse, that he is content to let them fall, one by one, while he preserves his image abroad.
History is unforgiving to leaders who abandon their own in times of crisis. Solidarity is not declared from airport lounges; it is demonstrated in courtrooms, police stations, and public addresses. A President who cannot stand with his embattled team at home risks being remembered not as a reformer, but as a bystander.
The cells are full. The questions are louder.
And the President is away.
