The Politics of Covid Responses in African Cities: Lilongwe

This paper analyses the politics of the Covid-19 response in Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital city. It describes public policy measures centred around treatment, prevention and mitigation of the pandemic, and then explains how these were shaped by dynamics in the Covid-19 policy domain, an arena in which different actors and ideas competed and cooperated over the appropriate response. It goes on to provide some insights into how the response shaped and was shaped by the country’s political settlement. It finds that although the pandemic witnessed some novel responses in social policy, such as urban cash transfers, in general, resource-strapped public institutions struggled to cope with the pandemic’s impact. In the policy domain, biomedical professionals tended to have the upper hand, but early attempts to impose stringent social distancing measures were resisted by opposition actors and concerned citizens and overruled by the courts. Meanwhile, some pandemic resources were diverted to patronage and corruption, as one might expect for a competitive clientelist political settlement, although this was exposed by an increasingly active social media and civil society. Lilongwe, as the capital city, holds a special place in Malawi’s political settlement and is a political heartland for the current government. However, recent constitutional changes have inclined political parties to seek broader electoral coalitions than hitherto, inclining the ruling coalition not to over-concentrate response efforts on the capital.