By Durell Namasani
The search warrant is, on its face, almost comically narrow. Police want a six-year-old video. Specifically, footage of a March 6, 2020 press briefing at Lingadzi Inn featuring Timothy Mtambo, Gift Trapence, and Reverend McDonald Sembereka . The alleged offence? “Soliciting another person to break the law” .
Six years. A video. A charge that, in any sane jurisdiction, would have been dealt with or forgotten by now.
But this was never really about the video. It is about the men in it.
Consider the timeline. Earlier this year, police obtained arrest warrants for the three former Human Rights Defenders Coalition leaders over alleged bail breaches in a case that was withdrawn in October 2020 . When a magistrate cancelled those warrants—correctly noting that you cannot breach bail conditions in a case that no longer exists—the State didn’t slink away. It announced its intention to “revive” the matter . Then came the visits. Officers turning up at their homes. Cars with foreign plates circling . And now, a warrant to raid a media house for a press conference that is old enough to start primary school.
Why?
The answer is not complicated. It is written in the fuel queues that stretch for miles, in the empty forex bureaus, in the maize prices that have climbed 16 percent in a single month . Malawi’s economy is in the grip of a long-term crisis: tobacco earnings—the country’s main source of foreign exchange—collapsed by 44 percent this season , fuel shortages have motorists sleeping at petrol stations , and households in the south are sliding toward crisis levels of food insecurity .
The DPP promised to fix this. It has not.
And it knows what happens next. It knows that when Malawians are hungry and lining up for fuel, they eventually stop lining up quietly. It saw what the HRDC did in 2019 and 2020, when mass demonstrations helped strip the party of power. The government’s own people are reportedly saying it out loud: sources say a strategy was hatched to “eliminate credible voices” before they can mobilise public anger . Treason charges—which carry the death penalty in Malawi—have been floated as a way to neutralise them politically .
The HRDC has already been deregistered as an NGO, a move that came just days after it announced plans for nationwide demonstrations . The current leadership insists it will keep organising anyway. But the message to the old guard is clear: we can take your organisation, and we can come for you personally.
The legal mechanics are almost beside the point. Even if the State succeeds in reviving a dead case, even if it extracts the Zodiak footage and finds some way to spin a 2020 speech into a criminal conspiracy, the damage is already being done. The point is the harassment. The point is the knock on the door at night. The point is making sure that anyone who might lead the next protest knows exactly what awaits them.
This is not law enforcement. It is political hygiene. And it is what governments do when they have run out of ideas and are running scared.
The DPP cannot fix the forex shortage. It cannot conjure fuel. It cannot make the rains come on time. What it can do is try to make sure that when the anger finally boils over, there is no one left to lead the march.
A six-year-old video is not evidence. It is a warning. And the warning is not directed at Mtambo, Trapence, or Sembereka. It is directed at anyone watching who might be thinking about what comes next.
