Jacob Zuma’s acerbic tongue is well known. Malawi was once at its receiving end when the former President, in an attempt to convince Gauteng residents to pay urban e-tolls, blurted: “We can’t think like Africans in Africa, generally. This is Johannesburg. It’s not some national road in Malawi.”

Malawi is one of Africa’s poorest nations, with many of its citizens working in South Africa, the regional power, which is perhaps why Zuma thought the country deserved this jibe. Malawi might be poor in a material sense, but events of the past 12 months or so have proved that the former British colony is ‘rich’ in a way that is envied by many countries in Africa: its judiciary is truly independent, and its democracy is healthy.

For the uninitiated, the re-election in May 2019 of Peter Mutharika as State President was nullified by Malawi’s Constitutional Court in February this year, owing to several irregularities. Some of these were pretty primitive, such as electoral officials’ use of Tipp-Ex fluid to modify some results. After opposition parties had headed to the apex court, there were reports of a carrot-and-stick strategy to get judges to dismiss their appeal, involving cash inducements and intimidation. The good men and women of the bench, however, chose to follow their consciences. And when embittered citizens took to the streets to express their anger at the apparent electoral fraud, the army chose to protect them instead of putting the protests down.

The court-ordered rerun of the election, held last month, was won by an opposition candidate. There were no attempts whatsoever by the army to block the transfer of power, which, by the way, has happened all too frequently in Africa.

Now we have a President Lazarus MacCarthy Chakwera in Malawi. The 65-year-old former clergyman said all the right things in his acceptance speech. He intoned: “Vice-President Saulos Chilima and I accept this challenge and task. We will pursue it, not just as servants accountable to you voters, but as stewards of the hopes of millions of children, born and unborn, who have no vote . . . Now, I am no stranger to the benefits of good government. Although I was raised in a poor village like most Malawians; raised without inherited riches or political connections like most Malawians; raised without electricity or running water like most Malawians; I stand here before you because I had one of the blessings of God that young Malawians today do not: the blessing of growing up in a well-governed Malawi.”

For the sake of Malawians, I hope he does not morph into a President who does not hold the ideal of good governance dear. Malawians have suffered for far too long. Although the late Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who founded the political party that Chakwera now leads – the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) – started well, he soon became a monster who brooked no criticism.

Many of his former comrades who dared to speak against some of his decisions either paid with their lives – assassinated by goons on the State’s payroll – or spent lengthy spells in prison. The more famous ones include Jack Mapanje, the celebrated writer and poet, who was jailed from 1987 to 1991 for his collection, Of Chameleons and Gods, which directly criticised Banda’s administration. Orton Chirwa and his wife Vera, both lawyers who helped found the MCP during colonial times, were forced into exile in Zambia after a dispute with Banda, and were later abducted and brought back to Malawi, where Orton died in prison in 1992. Vera was released a year later.

The administrations that ruled Malawi from 1994, when Banda was dislodged from the Presidency after 30 years, have not done much to improve the lot of Malawians. Malawi is categorised by the United Nations as a least-developed country and its per capita gross domestic product is $1 200 (in 2017 dollar terms).

Indeed, Chakwera has his work cut out for him.