Vice-President Michael Usi, yesterday, crossed the 100-day mark in the role, and experts are saying his growing political and public service stature could make him an asset to the governing Malawi Congress Party (MCP).
Political and governance analysts have since hailed Usi for finding his own political identity as a people-centric and local development-oriented leader who has shown potential to command following.
President Lazarus Chakwera appointed Usi as the country’s Vice-President on June 20 2024 to replace Saulos Chilima who died in a plane crash on June 10 2024 alongside eight others at Nthungwa on the Nkhata Bay side of Viphya Plantation.
Usi, who clocked 110 days in office yesterday, has used his position to push for increased access to National Economic Empowerment Fund (Neef) loans by small-scale businesses.
He has also conducted surprise visits to some public offices to improving working culture and efficiency in service delivery while projecting himself as a man of the people.
In his assessment in an interview yesterday, Human Rights Defenders Coalition (HRDC) chairperson Gift Trapence said Usi has tried to bring a sense of professionalism in the public sector.
He said: “I would give him a 70 percent score. He has been a balancing factor and was a good choice both politically and administratively at a time the country lost a man that was the hope of this country.”
On his part, governance analyst George Chaima said he found Usi’s performance impressive, considering that the UTM Party, which he leads by virtue of being Chilima’s running mate in the disputed 2019 Presidential Election, left the governing Tonse Alliance less than a month after his appointment.
In 2020, UTM and MCP were part of the Tonse Alliance, which won the court-sanctioned fresh presidential election on June 23 that year.
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But in July this year, UTM secretary general Patricia Kaliati said the party was leaving the governing bloc because MCP had undermined terms of the alliance.
Said Chaima: “After the shake-up in the alliance, Usi chose to continue serving Malawians by championing pro-poor programmes and now he seems to have won the support of the people.”
However, Centre for Social Accountability and Transparency executive director Willy Kambwandira said in a separate interview that Usi can do better in his role by focusing on public sector reforms as a solution to addressing service delivery challenges.
UTM is set to hold a national elective conference on November 17 this year where Usi could face competition for the party presidency from Kaliati, former Reserve Bank governor Dalitso Kabambe, engineer-cum-motivational speaker and entrepreneur Matthews Mtumbuka and UTM patron Engineer Newton Kambala.
In the face of the 50-percent-plus-one law as interpreted by the High Court sitting as a Constitutional Court in 2020 and upheld by the Malawi Supreme Court of Appeal, MCP is yet to find an alliance partner for the September 16 2025 General Elections, making Usi’s perceived growing political capital crucial to the ruling party’s electoral calculations.
In separate interviews yesterday, political analysts Wonderful Mkhutche and Chimwemwe Tsitsi said despite the strong start, Usi has his work cut out for him to win back control of UTM and convince the party’s rank and file to support another alliance with MCP.
Last week, Usi told a rally in Lilongwe that his role and that of others in UTM Party is to ensure that the legacy and vision of UTM Party founding president Chilima does not die.
