Ballots, Bread and the Bargain We Forgot

In chasing the dismantling of cartels, government lost the chance to strike a necessary deal with the private sector, leaving Malawians with ballots in hand but little bread on the table.

It is dawn in Dowa. Grey mist hugs the tomato gardens as Esther, a smallholder farmer, ties her chitenje tighter against the morning chill. She is 54, a mother of four, and like thousands of Malawians she is up early to queue at a polling station. In her hand is a voter’s card she treats with the same care as her bank passbook. She has seen governments come and go, but she has never missed a vote. “This,” she murmurs to me as we wait, “is the only power we have.” Her eyes are steady but her stomach is empty.

A few years ago, this same country stunned the continent. In 2020, the Constitutional Court overturned a flawed election and ordered a re-run. Democracy here seemed not just alive but exemplary, a beacon of judicial courage. Political scientist Larry Diamond calls democracy “a system of regular, free, and fair competition for power.” In that moment, Malawi was the textbook case.

But as Esther casts her ballot this time, the promise of that moment feels far away. Fertilizer once promised just a little over K4,500 now costs more than K100,000. Inflation erodes her savings. She goes to bed worried, as do traders in Blantyre and clerks in Lilongwe. “Economics,” John Maynard Keynes wrote, “is about how to secure the maximum of well-being with the minimum of effort.” For many Malawians, well-being has become a moving target.

Her frustration is not unique. Farmers want affordable inputs. Traders want forex to restock their shelves. Civil servants want salaries that stretch to the end of the month. They are not wrong to demand change; they are exercising the most basic right of a democracy, accountability. Yet behind the scenes, policy choices have collided with economic realities. The government turned its energy to dismantling monopolies and cartels, a noble long-term goal, but underestimated the short-term pain. As sociologist Max Weber warned, “politics is the slow boring of hard boards.” Breaking entrenched oligopolies takes not months but years.

Nearly every sector in Malawi, fuel, sugar, fertilizer, passports, has long been dominated by a few players. It took decades to build these networks; it will take years to unwind them. In the meantime, the state must still create a favorable environment for business to thrive so that growth and supply are not suffocated. This delicate trade-off has now become visible in queues for passports, empty shelves, and price shocks.

Behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman reminds us that “nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” Voters rarely weigh invisible long-term benefits; they feel immediate pain. So while many cheered when government struck at the cartels, they now quietly long for the return of the old order that, for all its flaws, at least ensured sugar for tea and fuel in the pumps. As political scientist Niccolò Machiavelli observed, “it is better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both” but in economic governance, fear can drive producers underground, hurting consumers first.

Having worked at the highest levels of a ministry, I have learned that compromise between government and private sector is not weakness but statecraft. The wiser path would have been to gather these so-called cartels and their leaders at one table and negotiate a phased transition: secure forex, fuel, food and fertilizer first; then reform ownership structures gradually. Sometimes a “deal with the devil” is less about surrender and more about sequencing.

Malawi’s private sector holds the forex and the means to earn it. It also controls the channels to expatriate it. To save the economy and by extension the legitimacy of government these actors should have been treated as reluctant allies rather than sworn enemies. As Amartya Sen has argued, “development is freedom,” but it is also food, fuel and fertilizer. You cannot eat a principle.

Back at the polling station in Dowa, Esther folds her ballot and drops it into the box. Around her, people murmur about the high cost of living, about fertilizer, about forex. This is not cynicism; it is hunger. Her vote is a silent question to the nation’s leaders: will you deliver bread as well as ballots.

The answer to that question will decide not just elections but the future of Malawi’s experiment in democracy and whether the next time Esther votes, she does so with hope in her heart or only dust on her shoes.