Now that we know that over seven million Malawians have shown interest to vote, political architects are polishing up their promises ahead of the September 16, 2025 General Eletion.

These promises are inscribed in social contracts called manifestos which the National Planning Commission has directed should be aligned to the Malawi 2063.

We take a look at what Malawians were promised in 2019 by three political parties; Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Malawi Congress Party (MCP) and UTM.

While they shared common developmental pillars— such as economic growth, infrastructure, energy, agriculture, governance, youth empowerment, security, public sector reforms, and foreign policy—the feasibility of these promises varied.

DPP

We have introduced Free Secondary Education. Moving forward… the DPP government will continue with the Free Secondary School education. We will abolish all developments and other payments,

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration abolished tuition fees in public secondary schools on September 25 2018. However, the legs of the decision were very short to continue as the students continued paying. Unicef estimated an annual cost of K7.33 billion for 733 Community Day Secondary Schools (CDSSs), making full implementation unsustainable.

We will upgrade all Community Day Secondary Schools to the level of conventional secondary school in order to improve education quality.”

Already, at the time of the manifesto there were approximately 1,101 community day secondary schools (CDSS) in the country, representing the majority of secondary schools in the country. According to the Ministry of Education, conventional secondary schools are those with proper structures like libraries, laboratories, hostels in some cases and of course enough qualified teachers. However, at the time of the manifesto development there were less than 500 laboratories out of the over 1,000 schools.

We will construct a dual carriage highway from Blantyre to Mzuzu through Lilongwe.

This was also unattainable in five years. The rehabilitation of the M1 road which started around 2018 is a classic example. The rehabilitation works have already passed over seven years and of course works are still ongoing.

MCP

Set up a bank to concentrate on giving credit to the youth and women to increase their access to and full participation in the country’s mainstream economic processes.

It is common knowledge that many youth- and women-led businesses are startups, which face a high risk of failure. Without strong repayment structures, non-performing loans could cripple the bank. If the bank is state-run, there is a risk of political favoritism in loan approvals, leading to inefficiencies and corruption. A case in point is the Malawi Savings Bank.

Int