Good evening. President Daniel Chapo’s weekend trip to Blantyre for the inauguration of Malawi’s new leader, Peter Mutharika, was more than a gesture of regional solidarity. It was an investment — political and economic — in a relationship that has too often been defined by mistrust and missed opportunity.
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For decades, colonial legacies and security tensions coloured ties between the two neighbours. Malawi’s founding president, Hastings Banda, maintained close relations with Portugal’s Salazar and Caetano regimes, and his successors offered sanctuary to Renamo during Mozambique’s civil war. Geography, too, has long bound the two countries in uneasy interdependence: landlocked Malawi depends on Mozambican ports and transport corridors for access to global markets, while Mozambique competes with Tanzania and South Africa to offer the most efficient and secure routes.
