Malawi Does Not Have A Mindset Problem. It Has A System Problem

-In memory of Dr. Saulos Klaus Chilima, who started a conversation his country has not yet had the courage to finish

By James Woods *

On October 30, 2020, Dr. Saulos Chilima stood at the Bingu International Convention Centre in Lilongwe and delivered what became one of the most discussed public addresses in modern Malawian political life. The lecture was titled The Imperative for Mindset Change for National Development in Malawi. For forty televised minutes he challenged his country on its obsession with trivia, on opportunistic tendencies, on the worship of leaders, on mediocre leadership, and on a culture that had chosen comfort over accountability for too long. He said: “The change that we talk about, the transformation we talk about, the reforms we talk about, the development that we want will not fall from heaven. It is going to be done by the people of Malawi.”

He was right. And that rightness, unfinished, is the most important thing Malawi must now reckon with.

Dr. Chilima died in June 2024, taken from his country at the moment it needed his energy most. He graduated from Chancellor College at the University of Malawi with a degree in Economics, returned for his Masters in Economics at the same institution, and later earned a doctorate in Knowledge Management from the University of Bolton through the Malawi Institute of Management. Before politics he was the first Malawian to serve as Managing Director of Airtel Malawi, a man who understood systems, incentives, and the mechanics of institutional transformation from the inside. When he spoke about mindset change, he spoke as someone who had spent his career watching what happens when institutions get the conditions right and what happens when they do not. Rest well, Dr. Chilima. The conversation you started deserved more time, and more honesty, than it has received since your passing.

Malawi has been told to change its mindset for thirty years. In those thirty years, per capita income has declined, public debt has tripled, and the interest Malawi pays on that debt now exceeds the combined budgets for health and education. The problem was never the mindset.

Here is the honesty that deserves.

Five years since MW2063 was launched, the government’s own Economic and Fiscal Policy Statement for 2026 confirms that while 87 percent of planned interventions were rolled out, only 40 percent are on track to meet their targets. The UN Common Country Analysis describes Malawi’s economy as structurally constrained, with negative per capita GDP growth in four of the past five years. Poverty has not declined. The proportion of Malawians below the international poverty line rose from 76 percent in 2023 to 76.6 percent in 2025. To reach lower middle-income status by 2030 as MW2063 requires, Malawi needs GDP growth averaging 6 percent annually. It grew at 1.9 percent in 2025, below the population growth rate of 2.6 percent. The average Malawian is getting poorer every year while the vision document sits on government websites awaiting implementation.

Before MW2063 came Vision 2020, launched at the turn of the millennium with the ambition of making Malawi a technologically driven middle-income economy within a generation. By 2020 it had failed entirely. The independent review commissioned by the National Planning Commission concluded with words that should have stopped the country cold: Malawi had been efficiently doing the wrong things. MW2063 was built on the lessons of that failure. Five years in, the UN reports only 21 percent of Malawi’s SDG targets are on track and 39 percent are deteriorating. The country has been having this conversation about transformation for thirty years. The problem has never been the quality of the vision. The problem is the system that operates beneath the vision and which no vision has yet had the courage to dismantle.

This is not a mindset problem.

Here is what needs to be understood about what Chilima actually argued. Mindset change was not his only prescription. It was one of seven enablers in MW2063. The others were governance, human capital development, private sector growth, sustainable infrastructure, public sector transformation, and science and technology. Six structural imperatives alongside one cultural one. Malawi heard the cultural lecture and broadly left the structural work undone. That is not what Chilima asked for. It is what was politically convenient.

The structural reality underneath MW2063 is this. Malawi’s banking sector made a combined K820 billion in profit in 2025, in a country where 76.6 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Through 2025 and into early 2026, banks were lending at average rates of 37.3 percent while paying depositors 4.3 percent, before the Reserve Bank began its rate reduction cycle. Government borrowed domestically because it had no functioning IMF programme and limited external financing. Banks had no incentive to lend to businesses or individuals when government paper offered guaranteed returns multiple times higher than any productive sector could sustainably offer. Private sector credit stands at K2.3 trillion. Domestic government debt stands at K16 trillion. The Malawian entrepreneur who has genuinely changed her mindset, who wants to manufacture, to process, to export, cannot access capital at a rate that makes a business viable. No lecture changes that arithmetic.

Malawi’s public debt has reached K23.9 trillion, 90.9 percent of GDP. Interest payments this year total K2.793 trillion, consuming 43 percent of every kwacha of domestic revenue before a nurse receives her salary, before a drug reaches a district hospital, before a road is repaired. The entire health budget is K1.02 trillion. The entire education budget is K1.28 trillion. The interest bill exceeds both combined. This year’s budget simultaneously allocated K1.145 trillion to a constituency development fund whose oversight rules had not been written at the time of allocation. A country paying more to service its debt than it spends on the health and education of its people is not suffering from a mindset problem. It is suffering from a structural catastrophe that no lecture, however powerful, can address.

The generation Chilima was speaking to in that lecture is now entering this economy. The World Bank confirmed in February 2026 that 270,000 young Malawians enter the labour market every year while the economy creates roughly 40,000 formal jobs to receive them. At that rate, it would take nine years to absorb a single year’s intake of job seekers, and every year a new intake joins the queue. These are young people who stayed in school, who sat their examinations, who believed the promise that education and effort would be rewarded. The system has not changed to meet them. A changed mindset walking into that labour market produces the same outcome as an unchanged one.

This is not a criticism of Chilima. It is an extension of him. He was Minister of Economic Planning and Public Sector Reforms precisely because he understood that institutional architecture determines outcomes more powerfully than individual attitude. He championed MW2063 not as a cultural manifesto but as a structural blueprint with seven interdependent enablers. The tragedy is that the lecture on one of those enablers became the public memory of the whole project, while the six structural ones quietly fell behind schedule.

What Malawi needs is not a better attitude. It needs a banking system structurally required to serve the productive economy rather than the government’s debt habit. It needs an interest rate environment that makes lending to a farmer in Kasungu as rational as holding a treasury bill. It needs an IMF programme that stabilises the external financing environment and reduces the government’s dependence on domestic borrowing at punishing rates. It needs a fiscal architecture that treats the K2.793 trillion interest bill with the same urgency it allocates to the constituency fund. It needs the six structural enablers of MW2063 given the political attention that mindset change received when it trended on social media in October 2020.

The unfinished conversation Chilima began is this. Malawi’s people are not the constraint on Malawi’s development. They never were. The system that manages their resources, taxes their effort, borrows in their name, and pays their future out in interest to institutions that profit from the habit is the constraint. That system will not change through mindset. It will change through the kind of structural courage that Chilima was building toward when his country lost him.

Malawi does not need another mindset lecture. It needs the other six enablers built, funded, and held to account with the same energy and the same honesty he brought to everything he did.

 * James Woods is a governance and strategic communications professional with roots in Malawi. He served as a Senior Diplomat at the Mission of Malawi to the European Union and is a former senior staffer at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. He holds an Executive MBA from the University of Oxford and a Master’s from the London School of Economics. He is an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow.