Bakili Muluzi
Bakili Muluzi was president of Malawi from 1994 to 2004, the first after Banda's thirty years, elected in the multiparty election of May 1994 that followed the referendum of 1993, in which the country had voted two to one against the one-party state. He was a Muslim trader from Machinga in the south who had been Banda's own secretary-general before falling out with him. The first term was the opening. The political prisoners were freed, the Young Pioneers disbanded, the press licensed, the dress code and the ban on long hair repealed, free primary schooling introduced, which put a million more children in classrooms with nobody to teach them. Banda was tried for the murder of four ministers in 1983 and acquitted. The second term was the other thing. There was the famine of 2001 and 2002, in which the strategic grain reserve had been sold, on the IMF's advice and to the government's friends, before the harvest failed, and hundreds died. There was the third-term campaign, in which he tried to amend the constitution twice, in 2002 and 2003, and failed by three votes. There was the anointing of Bingu wa Mutharika as his successor, who won in 2004 and turned on him within a year. He was born in Machinga, educated in Denmark and at Huddersfield. He was a clerk, a district councillor, and a Malawi Congress Party MP and minister of education. He left the government in 1982, made a fortune in transport and sugar, and founded the United Democratic Front in 1992 out of the referendum campaign. He was arrested in 2006 and charged in 2009 with stealing eleven million dollars of aid money, a case that has been adjourned for fifteen years and never tried. He was chairman of the UDF until 2009, when his son Atupele took the seat. He lives in Blantyre, the founder of the democracy and of the pattern in which each president prosecutes the last.
- Lived: 1943 CE – ?
- Nationality: Malawian
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
