Malawi President goes missing and worried Malawians take to social media to try find him

Malawians have been asking, to anyone who cares to know, about the whereabouts of President Peter Mutharika.

President of the landlocked country since May 2014, Mutharika, who spent time teaching law at Washington University, travelled to New York for the 71st General Assembly.

The meeting ended on September 26 and it was expected that heads of state would return to their homelands.

But Mutharika did not and his absence has caused a buzz in Malawi.

With the hashtag #BringbackMutharika, Malawians have posed questions, criticised government officials and gossiped about the man’s health.

The problem has largely been poor communication from government officials, and local newspapers have lambasted the lack of coherent information.

Private newspaper Nyasa Times wrote of officials' “incredible inability to answer the many questions making rounds on tongues of the people of Malawi.”

And according to Boni Dulani, who teaches political science at the University of Malawi, they should be shown the door.

“Peter Mutharika should fire his PR team. They have embarrassed him & Malawi,” he argued on Thursday.

“Of course, a President practicing 1940 politics in 2016 is an embarrassment to himself.”

It could be that Mutharika’s own officials have been in the dark or that they were simply asked to keep silent about it.
'MEETING PEOPLE'
On Thursday, Malawi government spokesman Malison Ndau told the BBC that Prof Mutharika was still meeting “a number of people one by one.”

The identity of these people or the venues of those meetings were not clarified.

Malawi’s State House had announced on Tuesday that the president will arrive next Sunday at 1pm.

“State House is informing the public that His Excellency Professor Arthur Peter Mutharika will on Sunday 16th October 2016 return to Malawi from the United States of America (USA) where he attended the 71st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and also attended to various government businesses.

“The President shall arrive at Kamuzu International Airport (KIA) at 1300hrs,” said Presidential Press Secretary Mgeme Kalilani in a Facebook post.

The choice of Sunday followed his failure to arrive last Saturday. And activists in Malawi have challenged the government officials to provide footage of those meetings if at all he was holding them.

Without that, it has fuelled a rumour that the man, 76, is unwell and was admitted to a hospital in the US.

RELATIVELY STABLE

With an estimated population of 16.8 million, Malawi has been relatively stable since 1991, when the one-party system ended. It has held five presidential elections since.

Yet the current miscommunication depicts a country still with a hangover from the past.

“We have a system whose one foot is in autocracy and another in democracy and therefore operating in such a dual conflicting lane highway makes this country, its leadership, its citizenry and its politics move in insane circles,” private newspaper Nyasa Times wrote in a commentary.

Educated at Yale University, the Malawian lawyer rose to the presidency after defeating incumbent Joyce Banda in May 2014.

Malawians may generally be justified in demanding answers. Mutharika’s elder brother Bingu wa Mutharika was himself president of Malawi and died in office in 2012.

He collapsed in his country, was rushed to South Africa for treatment and was declared dead two days later.

The circumstances surrounding his health and death were so poorly communicated that the announcement was made on the day Joyce Banda, who had been Bingu’s vice-president, was sworn in as the new president.