GGreetings from the Munda wa Chitedze Farm, where we relocated from the hustle and bustle of your city. Here, we do not suffer in silence in a concrete jungle; we live in unity and harmony with nature. The rains are doing well, and the chitedze is looking promising.
We expect a bumper yield. As you know, chitedze seed is highly nutritious—rich in flavonoids and prenylated isoflavonoids with strong antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anticancer properties. Dear Diary, our obsession with maize once made it bad news that people in Balaka were eating chitedze.
Our nsima addiction runs so deep that after a meal of mashed chitedze one would still ask: Where is the food? Yet Malawians are a bundle of contradictions. Maize is our staple food and a key driver of inflation, but the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee—using the Household Economy Approach—has warned that four million Malawians will face hunger between October 2025 and March 2026.
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This is baffling for an agro-based economy. How can a country that depends on agriculture fail to feed its people? The contradictions deepen.
Malawi and Zambia receive similar rainfall, yet Zambia reportedly has a surplus of over 500 000 metric tonnes (MT) of maize while Malawi faces severe deficits. So dire is the situation that within a month of taking office, President Peter Mutharika reportedly asked his Zambian counterpart, Hakainde Hichilema, for 200 000MT of maize. As we speak, grain is being hauled from Chipata to the National Food Reserve Agency’s strategic reserves in Lilongwe.
At the same time, despite a maize export ban, the November 2025 Maize Market Report by the International Food Policy Research Institute reported that Malawian maize was being sold through the Mchinji border into Zambia. As Alice observed in Wonderland: Curiouser and curiouser. To facilitate imports, the World Bank extended a $50 million (about K86.7 billion) facility.
Yet earlier, Admarc reportedly demanded at least K300 billion to purchase 250 000 metric tonnes of maize, while government allocated only K20 billion to buy 17 000 MT for sale in its 349 markets. Dear Diary, the contradictions persist. While Admarc’s figures strain logic, reports suggest maize has been rotting in its sheds.
We at the Munda wa Chitedze Farm have a saying: Admarc is more rotten than its maize. When Parliament’s Agriculture Committee pushed to increase the maize budget from K60 billion to K150 billion, it was revealed that much of the cost lay not in buying grain, but in warehousing and fumigation. Among the hungriest Malawians are prisoners.
Images show inmates struggling to access food. They eat once a day—porridge-like nsima accompanied by half-cooked, weevil-infested beans. This is why prisoners long for zisomo, the term they use for presidential pardons.
Release at the pleasure of the president is every inmate’s dream—and for good reason. Poor suspects can languish on remand for over 20 years without trial, while those with good lawyers can challenge even a 90-day remand in court. Malawi Congress Party Secretary General Richard Chimwendo Banda is doing just that.
Other convicts with competent legal representation secure bail pending appeal, escaping prison hunger—though many still receive regular meals from relatives inside. A pardon, therefore, is the greatest gift a prisoner can receive, which is why it must be exercised with fairness and integrity. It is thus troubling that among the 222 prisoners pardoned by President Mutharika over the festive season was Pika Manondo, convicted of conspiracy to murder former Budget Director Paul Mphwiyo. His co-accused, MacDonald Kumwembe, remains the only one incarcerated for the crime, while former Attorney General Ralph Kasambara died while on bail pending appeal after serving over a year of his 15-year sentence.
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