Dear Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda,
Today, Malawi remembers you again. Some will remember you with admiration. Others with pain. Many with mixed emotions. But whether one agrees with every chapter of your rule or not, one truth remains difficult to erase: you built a nation with a sense of direction.
You understood the power of education. Not just access to education, but quality education. Education rooted in excellence, discipline, productivity, and responsibility. Schools were places of learning and order. Teachers were respected. Students respected themselves, their teachers, and public institutions. Today, many of our schools have become centres of disorder. Vandalism is increasing. Drug abuse is rising. Sexual violence is becoming normalised. Respect is disappearing.
You taught a generation that hard work mattered. Teachers sacrificed their time for students. Students believed effort was the bridge to success. Education was not approached casually. It was pursued with seriousness and purpose. Today, many seek shortcuts. Commitment is fading. Excellence is no longer celebrated enough. Mediocrity has slowly become acceptable.
Under your leadership, schools operated like communities. Teachers supported one another. Students learned together. Communities protected schools because schools belonged to the people. There was competition, yes, but not competition driven by greed, bitterness, or selfishness. We have since become a society where individual success matters more than collective progress.
You invested in infrastructure because you understood that environment shapes learning. The classrooms, teachers’ houses, roads, and institutions built during your era still stand today as reminders of planning and vision. Yes, enrolment has grown and demands have changed, but many schools today are collapsing physically and morally. Some learners sit on floors. Others learn under trees. In some places, hope itself is absent.
You also understood the dignity of teachers. Government honoured its obligation to pay teachers, even where resources were limited. Delays were explained. Leadership felt accountable. Today, salaries delay without explanation. Promotions are delayed for years. Merit has been replaced by patronage. Hardworking teachers are overlooked while politically connected individuals are rewarded. This has damaged morale. A demoralised teacher cannot inspire a nation.
Dr. Banda, perhaps one of the most difficult truths to admit is that your four cornerstones unity, loyalty, obedience, and discipline helped shape the foundation of our nationhood and education system.
We may debate the methods. We may reject excesses. We may criticise parts of your rule. But we cannot deny that Malawi once had a stronger sense of national identity, order, public service, and collective responsibility.
Today, leadership is increasingly driven by self-interest. Public service has become personalised. Politics divides more than it unites. Institutions are weaker. Accountability is selective. Citizens are losing trust in leadership and in one another.
Yet this letter is not written to glorify the past blindly. It is written to challenge the present honestly.
Nations are not built through slogans. They are built through sacrifice, discipline, courage, integrity, and visionary leadership. Malawi desperately needs these values again. Not dictatorship. Not fear. But leadership anchored in service, accountability, patriotism, merit, and love for country.
You left many scars. But you also left many lessons. And perhaps that is why, decades after your passing, Malawi still pauses every 14th May to remember you. Because history has a strange way of forcing nations to confront what they have lost, what they have become, and what they still can be.
May your soul continue to rest in peace.
Yours sincerely,Benedicto Kondowe
The Education Hub
14 May 2026
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