ZOMBA, MALAWI — APRIL 30, 2025 — In a fiery and vision-filled address that blurred the lines between commencement speech and national manifesto, President Dr. Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera stood before the graduating class of the University of Malawi and thundered a rallying cry not just to the assembled scholars, but to an entire nation teetering between its haunted past and a promised renaissance. Beneath the soaring arches of the Chancellor College Great Hall—described by the President himself as “the college God loves most”—Malawi’s Head of State cast his presidency as a bridge from brokenness to boldness, declaring his foundational reforms in higher education as the bedrock of a new republic.
Standing tall at the pulpit, the former theologian-turned-president turned the graduation into a national reckoning, invoking his bold dismantling of the infamous “evil quota system” and declaring war on “briefcase institutions and diploma mills.” In dramatic cadence, Chakwera credited his administration with tripling higher education enrollment from 10,000 to 30,000, creating a standalone Ministry of Higher Education, and appointing academic freedom firebrand Dr. Jessie Kabwila to lead the charge. With unmistakable global ambition, he framed the graduates not just as diploma-holders, but as front-line architects of the Malawi 2063 Vision—a middle-income dream powered by the ATM Strategy (Agriculture, Tourism, and Mining) and supercharged by 500 billion kwacha in upcoming loans for job creators. “You are not just graduates,” he declared. “You are builders of a new Malawi.”
