Former president Peter Mutharika
Former president Peter Mutharika is 85, soft-spoken and visibly slowed down by age. Yet in Malawi’s desperate hour, the man once toppled by a court ruling now stands again at the edge of power.
In the bustling markets of the capital Lilongwe, traders grumble about the price of maize. In the parched fields of the south, farmers scan the skies for rain. And in the middle of this despair, Mutharika, long dismissed as yesterday’s man, has become the improbable vessel of hope for millions.
The return of Mutharika — the main challenger to current President Lazarus Chakwera in this week’s election — is a paradox. In 2020, Malawi’s Constitutional Court stripped him of victory after exposing irregularities in the previous year’s election, including the notorious use of correction fluid to doctor voter tally sheets.
That moment was celebrated across Africa as proof that courts could rescue democracy from the grasp of incumbents. For Mutharika, it was humiliation, exile and the end of the story. Or so it seemed.
Five years later, he is back. And his message is devastatingly simple: life was better under my presidency.
Born in Thyolo in 1940, Mutharika built his life abroad. A Yale-trained lawyer, he taught international law for nearly four decades in the United States. He was cerebral, comfortable in lecture halls, far removed from the rough-and-tumble of African politics.
But politics drew him home under the wing of his brother, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s president from 2004 to 2012. When Bingu died in office, Peter stepped fully into the political arena. He entered parliament in 2009, rose quickly and by 2014 was president with just 36.4% of the vote.
Supporters credit him with roads, power plants and universities, many built with Chinese loans. Inflation dropped from 24% to single digits. For a time, the currency steadied and Malawians felt a measure of relief.
But those achievements sat alongside blackouts, food shortage and corruption allegations. In 2018, protesters flooded the streets after reports he pocketed $200 000 from a business person with a state contract. He was cleared in court, but the episode left a stain.
The deepest wound came with the 2019 election. The court’s nullification of his victory branded him as a man willing to compromise the very institutions that protect Malawi’s democracy.
Yet politics is rarely about memory. In Malawi’s case it is about hunger. Inflation has soared past 30%. A 44% devaluation of the kwacha and the devastation of Cyclone Freddy have pushed more than 70% of Malawians below the poverty line.
Chakwera, the man who replaced Mutharika, is blamed for the collapse. Mutharika, in contrast, has become a symbol of steadier days.
“When Mutharika was in power, fertiliser was cheap and food was plentiful,” said Eliza Justin, a market trader. “Now people scramble just to buy maize.”
The nostalgia is powerful. Polls in late 2024 and mid-2025 show Mutharika’s Democratic Progressive Party consistently ahead of Chakwera’s Malawi Congress Party.
Yet his comeback is far from assured. His party is divided. He expelled rivals such as Kondwani Nankhumwa, while former central bank governor Dalitso Kabambe called his record “a legacy of failure, division and betrayal”.
And then there is his age. At 85, Mutharika’s campaign appearances were slow, his energy halting. Even allies whispered doubts about whether he can survive the grind of the presidency.
For some Malawians, Mutharika embodied competence. For others, he was the reminder of institutions still scarred by his last tenure.
Journalist Golden Matonga captured the dilemma: “It is profound desperation that has made the once-banished Mutharika, now in his mid-80s, no longer seen as a witch to be exorcised but as a possible, if unlikely, cure to the curse of hunger and despair.”
Mutharika’s personal life is quiet. He has three children from his late first wife, Christophine, and in 2014 he married former MP Gertrude Maseko. In private, friends say, he is a studious man, more at ease with books than political rallies.
But the rallies kept coming. Malawi, a nation of 22 million battered by poverty and storms, was searching for a saviour.
And Peter Mutharika, academic, survivor, accused fraudster, improbable contender, is once again within reach of the presidency.