Malawi’s president, Peter Mutharika, recently called for and attended national prayers, asking God for good rains in the current rainy season. This came at a time when most districts across the country are experiencing a prolonged dry spell, with some areas having gone weeks without rainfall. What is being framed as a spiritual challenge is, in truth, a predictable governance failure, one whose consequences could soon shift from worry to outright fear.
Malawi often prides itself on being a “God-fearing nation,” and within that cultural framing, national prayers may appear harmless or even reassuring. Yet there is something deeply troubling about a state that repeatedly turns to prayer at moments that demand policy, planning, and investment. The real question is not whether Malawians should pray, but whether the country’s leadership should continue to substitute prayer for responsibility. Faith cannot be a development strategy.
Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in Mangochi, a lakeshore district in southern Malawi that I recently visited. Long before reaching the district, the effects of the dry spell were unmistakable. Maize plants at roughly the six-leaf stage were already wilting, their leaves grey and lifeless. Another week without rain would almost certainly wipe out crops in a district that sits beside two vast bodies of water, Lake Malawi and Lake Malombe. The irony is as cruel as it is obvious.
As Lake Malombe came into view, a colleague captured the absurdity of the situation: crops were dying just metres from an abundance of water, while farmers remained indoors, waiting for rain. This passive dependence on rainfall mirrors the state’s own posture. At both the local and national levels, Malawi behaves as though its natural resources are untouchable, unusable, or irrelevant—while hunger remains a recurring national emergency.
Public discourse around this crisis quickly dissolves into blame-shifting. Farmers blame government; government blames climate change; everyone eventually blames God. What is carefully avoided is the uncomfortable truth: Malawi has failed, repeatedly and deliberately, to invest in long-term agricultural resilience. Irrigation is not a new idea, nor is climate variability a sudden revelation. What is missing is political will.
For years, irrigation has featured prominently in speeches and policy documents, yet it remains largely rhetorical. Instead, leaders continue to lean on farm input subsidies—an approach that offers quick political returns but little structural transformation. Subsidies without irrigation are an exercise in self-deception. You cannot subsidise rain, nor can you negotiate with a changing climate.
Since the return to multiparty democracy in 1994, Malawi’s political leadership has consistently avoided development programmes that cannot be completed, branded, and campaigned on within a single five-year term. Long-term national projects have been sacrificed at the altar of electoral convenience. Development has been reduced to a performance, and governance to a cycle of public relations. The cost of this shortsightedness is borne not by politicians, but by poor Malawians whose survival is tied to an increasingly unreliable rainy season.
National prayers may offer comfort, but they also serve as a convenient distraction from accountability, from hard decisions, and from the urgent need to act. Malawi does not suffer from a lack of faith; it suffers from a surplus of political cowardice. What the country needs is not divine intervention, but leadership that is pragmatic, selfless, and genuinely patriotic, leadership willing to plan beyond elections, invest beyond slogans, and govern beyond prayers.
Spirit of Umunthu 