Bingu wa Mutharika

Bingu wa Mutharika was president of Malawi from 2004 until he died in office in April 2012, the economist whom Muluzi chose as his successor and who, within a year, had left Muluzi's party, founded his own, and put the former president's men on trial. His two terms were the two halves of one story. The first was the best years the country had had, the second the worst. The first term was the fertiliser subsidy of 2005, coupons for smallholders to buy seed and fertiliser at a tenth of the price, against the advice of the donors, which turned a maize deficit into a surplus in two years and made him the man the rest of Africa's agriculture ministers came to see. There were the growth of seven per cent, the debt cancelled in 2006, and the anti-corruption campaign that prosecuted Muluzi. He won the 2009 election with two thirds, the first Malawian to carry every region. The second term was the reverse. The foreign exchange ran out because he would not devalue the kwacha, and the fuel queues came. The British high commissioner was expelled in 2011 for a leaked cable calling him autocratic and intolerant of criticism, and Britain froze its aid. The demonstrations of 20 July 2011 were fired on and nineteen died. He was arranging for his brother Peter to succeed him when his heart stopped on 5 April 2012. The cabinet spent two days pretending he was alive in a South African hospital while it tried to keep the vice-president he had expelled from the party from taking the office the constitution gave her. He was born Brightson Thom in Thyolo, and took the name Bingu in the 1960s. He worked for the Zambian government and the World Bank, ran the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa from 1991 to 1997. He stood for president in 1999 and got half a per cent. He was Muluzi's economic planning minister before Muluzi picked him. The subsidy is what the country remembers. It is still paying for it, in the budget and in the rains.

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