Africa-Press – Malawi. When Malawi went to the polls on September 16, businessman and UTM senior member Newton Kambala was ready to make a difficult call: shut down his once-thriving construction company, Mkaka Construction.
“We were about to close our business,” Kambala revealed in an emotional recount. “Nothing was working. The economy was in free fall. We told ourselves: if the government doesn’t change today, we’ll lock the gates tomorrow.”
Founded in 1989, Mkaka Construction had once been a regional powerhouse in earth-moving and infrastructure development, operating across Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. But Kambala says the past five years under the Tonse Alliance government, dominated by the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), brought his enterprise to its knees.
A combination of fuel shortages, forex constraints, high-interest loans, and what he describes as “systemic corruption” forced the company to scale down drastically. “One grader alone uses 200 liters of fuel daily, but there were weeks without fuel. Meanwhile, the banks kept charging interest.”
More critically, he says, access to crucial spare parts was choked by persistent foreign exchange shortages. Equipment would break down and stay idle for months. “Suppliers couldn’t bring in parts. That paralyzed us,” Kambala explained.
What started as a slow decline became a freefall. Contracts dried up, salaries went unpaid, and staff resigned. Kambala admits he was forced to sell a house to pay his workers. “Sometimes I couldn’t sleep. I carry five years of stress on my shoulders. You can see it in my gray hair.”
He accuses the MCP-led government of politicizing the construction industry through what he describes as coercive kickbacks. “If you wanted a government contract, you had to commit 10% back to the party,” he alleged. “I refused. And I lost contracts worth over 7 billion kwacha.”
Kambala’s most painful claim is that completed government projects went unpaid for years, 0because he wouldn’t participate in the alleged kickback scheme. “I was blacklisted. Meanwhile, the bank wanted to repossess my home. How do you survive that?”
At its peak, Mkaka Construction turned over more than $10 million annually and employed over 1,000 people in Malawi alone. Today, turnover has fallen below $1 million, and regional operations like Zimbabwe have been shut down entirely.
Ironically, Kambala was among the business leaders who financially supported the anti-DPP protests in 2020, believing that a new government would restore transparency and economic growth.
“I thought we were fighting for change. But what we got was worse,” he said. “The DPP we demonstrated against was flawed, but at least there was space to breathe. Under MCP, business suffocated.”
Today, with a new government under President Arthur Peter Mutharika and a rebranded Democratic Progressive Party back in power, Kambala is cautiously optimistic. “We’ve already met with other business leaders who say they’re hopeful again. It feels like the darkness might finally be lifting.”
But for Kambala, the scars remain. His story is not just about business loss, it’s about betrayal, disillusionment, and the long road to rebuilding.
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