By Geoffrey J Kawanga
Africa-Press – Malawi. When fortune decides that a man’s moment has come, no shadow can quite blot him out. Alfred Gangata’s rise to Minister of State under President Arthur Peter Mutharika carries that air of inevitability, the sense of a story long written in rough drafts through courage, missteps, and persistence.
In the fevered months before the election, Gangata stood where few dared, inside the lion’s den of the Malawi Congress Party’s heartland. Others called it madness, a young man’s arrogance. He called it conviction. The fear that stalked those days, the whispered warnings about “zikwanje” and reprisals, seemed to pass him by. He carried himself with the unflinching calm of someone who had already made peace with risk.
On Times TV, he spoke in numbers. Two million for MCP, he said, and roughly 3.6 million for his own DPP. Many dismissed the forecast as campaign bravado. But in the aftermath, as the ballots told their tale, there was something almost prophetic in that offhand prediction.
The “Gangata factor,” as people now call it, rewrote the map of the election. The Central Region, once thought immovable, shifted underfoot. Votes in Lilongwe City, Nkhotakota, Salima, and Ntcheu carried the blue hue of DPP’s resurgence. It was not the work of a single rally or slogan, but of months of quiet, relentless groundwork. Gangata had been moving long before the drums of official campaigning began. He understood terrain, the human kind, as any good strategist does.
Now, his appointment has stirred new questions. Critics murmur about academic credentials, about youth, about readiness. But those who have met him tend to speak of clarity of mind and quick instinct, the sort of native intelligence that builds things from nothing. At 37, he has the CV of someone twice his age: a security company that once fielded a football club in the national league, a bakery, and a handful of ventures that bear his imprint of restlessness and ambition.
At Sanjika Palace, during the swearing-in, President Mutharika’s words were careful but telling. “I want to bring the youth into the economy,” he said. “With that in mind, I have appointed Hon. Alfred Gangata, an enterprising, very brave young man, to lead that department.”
The Ministry of State will sit in the President’s own office, a sign of trust as much as oversight. For the restless youth who have long wanted one of their own to speak for them, it is both a gesture and a test.
Gangata’s story, at its core, is not about perfection but persistence. He is a man still becoming, a figure who wears his scars as proof of passage. Whether his light dazzles or steadies the path ahead remains to be seen. For now, it is enough to note that it cannot be hidden.
Time, as they say, is fleeting, and this season belongs to him. In a field crowded with ambition, he has climbed by effort, not accident. Nothing came easily; he built his name brick by brick, steady and unhurried. Now the moment is his, and even his rivals concede that Alfred Gangata’s star is in ascendance…
Source: Malawi Nyasa Times
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