Africa-Press – Malawi. Every now and then, Malawi wakes up to yet another verbose outburst from Professor Danwood Chirwa — or should we say, Professor of Fallacies — a man whose habit of mistaking personal bitterness for intellect has long become academic folklore.
For years, scholars, students, and sober thinkers have questioned the quality and coherence of his arguments — often riddled with exaggerations, factual distortions, and emotional outbursts masquerading as intellectual critique. His social media essays, once meant to provoke thought, now provoke yawns. This latest attack on President Lazarus Chakwera over the pardon of Thom Mpinganjira is yet another example of how Danwood’s reasoning continues its steady descent into the abyss of irrelevance.
Let’s unpack this slow-motion intellectual wreck.
First, the facts.
Thom Mpinganjira was duly tried, convicted, and sentenced by a competent court of law. The same courts later granted him bail pending review — meaning every step of his case was processed within the law. There was no corruption, no manipulation, and no short-circuiting of justice. It was a transparent judicial journey, monitored by the same legal system that Professor Chirwa claims to revere.
Second, President Lazarus Chakwera acted well within his constitutional prerogative as Head of State when he exercised his right to pardon Mpinganjira. The Constitution — not Danwood’s emotions — gives the President absolute discretion to extend mercy. Whether one agrees with the choice or not, it remains entirely lawful. In fact, every President before Chakwera — including the ones Danwood once romanticized — has used that very power without moral uproar from our self-appointed philosopher of outrage.
Third, Danwood’s attempt to link this pardon to the 2020 Constitutional Court case is intellectually dishonest and embarrassingly lazy. The two are distinct episodes separated by legal process, time, and context. To argue that a lawful presidential pardon somehow insults the judiciary is not only illogical but reveals how far detached from reality this “professor” has drifted.
But the tragedy of his post is not merely its factual poverty — it’s the desperation with which he tries to decorate his argument with lies.
To invoke the fake “faeces at State House” story — a claim long discredited by multiple investigations — is the clearest sign of an academic in decline, scraping the bottom of the barrel for anything to appear relevant. For a man of letters to cite disinformation as evidence is not only unbecoming; it’s pathetic. It shows a mind that long abandoned the discipline of truth in favour of sensationalism.
In the end, what we see is not a critique of governance but a tantrum of envy — the noise of a man angry that Malawi’s political story moved on without consulting him.
There are professors who build ideas and those who build illusions. Professor Danwood Chirwa has unfortunately chosen the latter path — the loud, lonely road of a “scholar of spite”, whose words may thunder but no longer strike.
As for his latest rant, it is not an act of courage. It is an act of intellectual desperation — a last, loud gasp from a man watching his credibility collapse under the weight of his own contradictions.
In academic circles, there’s a word for such professors — a demagogue in a gown.
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