Copyright nyasatimes
Since his inaugural speech on Saturday, October 4, President Arthur Peter Mutharika has moved with deliberate calm, a man redrawing his map, line by line. Each appointment, each name read aloud, adds another thread to a pattern that, taken as a whole, suggests not haste but design. The nation watches with unusual attentiveness. Never in recent memory has a list of appointments stirred such conversation, with expectation tipping into anxiety and curiosity giving way to speculation. For a country often accused of political fatigue, there is an unmistakable sense of alertness, as if people can feel something quietly being rearranged beneath the surface. Among the more telling choices is the appointment of Dr. Bright Molande as Principal Secretary for Foreign Affairs. It is a decision that carries the weight of continuity and the promise of renewal. For those who have followed Dr. Molande’s career, his ascent feels both natural and symbolic. He served in Mutharika’s first term as speechwriter, executive assistant, and Director of Information, shaping the rhythm and tone of a presidency still finding its voice. Before that, he lived another public life: scholar, teacher, and eventually Vice Principal at the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College. The two worlds, the academy and the state, are rarely so elegantly bridged. As a scholar of tragic mythology and postcolonial thought, Dr. Molande has spent years studying how power dresses itself in moral language, how myth becomes ideology, and how difference hardens into destiny. That sensitivity to symbols, to the subtle theatre of power, may be his most relevant credential. Diplomacy, after all, is politics performed on the world’s stage, where tone and gesture matter as much as policy. Molande embodies a model of public service that is easy to admire and difficult to practice: disciplined, literate, attuned to both thought and execution. In a bureaucracy often accused of procedural lethargy, he stands out as for the clarity of his sentences and the quiet rigor behind them. It is no small achievement to carry that precision from the lecture hall into the machinery of government, where words are instruments of policy rather than ideas. Foreign Affairs, under his stewardship, stands to benefit from that sensibility. It is not merely the management of relations but the choreography of language, how a nation defines itself, how it listens, how it speaks. His literary work has long argued that association, the linking of minds and meanings, is the essence of poetics. In that sense, diplomacy is his natural arena, the art of association elevated to a national scale. A man who has written for a president understands that words can steer history, not just describe it. He also knows that the strength of a small nation lies less in assertion than in connection. Viewed together, Mutharika’s appointments reveal a careful balance between experience and renewal, loyalty and competence. It is not the restlessness of revolution but the steadiness of revision, a reassertion of familiar strengths in a changing landscape. Dr. Bright Molande’s return to the administrative stage feels like an anchor in that broader composition: the scholar returned as statesman, the writer now entrusted with the sentences of state. The APM train moves, and it moves with direction. But it also moves with thought, each carriage named, each hand chosen, each motion purposeful. In that deliberate motion lies the quiet confidence of a government rediscovering its own rhythm.
