On 16 September 2025, Malawians head to the polls in what should be a critical moment for the country’s future. They will vote for their next president, members of parliament and local councillors.
The economy is reeling. Inflation is pushing food prices beyond reach. A severe El Niño-induced drought in 2024 has devastated livelihoods and left one in every four citizens food insecure.
This is just a small glimpse of what is otherwise a very dispiriting context. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
And yet, despite these pressing issues, or perhaps because of them, Malawi’s presidential race is a congested field featuring 17 candidates in a country with 7.2 million registered votes.
Among them are seasoned politicians, incumbent President Lazarus Chakwera, two former presidents – Peter Mutharika and Joyce Banda – and current Vice-President Michael Usi.
But it is fundamentally a two-horse race between the incumbent Lazarus Chakwera and former president Peter Mutharika. Voters are thus confronted with a repeat contest between the same two leaders who faced off in 2019, narrowing the space for the kind of political renewal that leadership change often brings.
Having worked in the field of elections and democratic governance in Africa, I have seen this trend play out far beyond Malawi’s borders. Zimbabwe’s 2018 presidential election had 23 candidates, Mali’s 2018 election had 24 candidates.
In South Africa, a record 70 political parties participated in the country’s 2024 general election. In total, 14,903 candidates vied for 887 seats in the national and provincial legislatures.
This overcrowding of candidates is also common in smaller nations with even fewer voters.
In Liberia, a nation with 2 million voters, 20 candidates ran to replace Africa’s first elected female leader, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in 2017. In Benin, 32 aspirants participated in the first round of the 2016 poll with some 4.7 million voters. In the Central African Republic, 30 candidates contested for the 2015 presidential election in a country with fewer than 6 million people.
So, we must ask, does this abundance of candidates reflect democratic growth, or expose the cracks in how our political systems are functioning, or are there alternative explanations?
More doesn’t always mean better
In theory, having a crowded ballot where many candidates or parties compete in an election, might seem like a positive sign. It can suggest that a country is open to different voices, inclusive in its politics and committed to democratic competition.
But from my perspective, as an African who deeply values genuine, accountable leadership, I interpret it differently. I see a risk that too many choices can overwhelm and confuse voters, making it harder for them to make informed decisions.
When the vote is split among dozens of candidates, no one ends up with a clear mandate from the people. Worse still, this apparent diversity can become a tool for manipulation. Political elites may encourage or exploit this crowded field to create the illusion of democracy, while avoiding real accountability.
If everyone is running, then no one truly stands out, and voters are left with noise instead of clarity. The result is a system that looks democratic on the surface, but is hollow at its core.
I share the concerns raised by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (Idea) which notes that the number of parties that contest an election can affect voter turnout by either providing more options to voters, or by confusing voters and making it difficult for them to judge whether their vote will have the desired impact or outcome.
In Malawi, as in Zimbabwe and many other African countries, a presidential candidate must secure more than 50% of the vote to win outright. On paper, this requirement is meant to ensure that a president has broad-based support. But the more candidates contesting an election, the harder it becomes for anyone to cross that threshold, often triggering a second-round runoff.
Elected office and transactional political entrepreneurship
Ideally, this should be a moment for coalition-building and democratic consensus. But in practice, it often leads to backroom negotiations, transactional alliances and power-brokering deals with little regard for ideology or public interest. Rarely does this translate into better governance or deeper democratic practice.
For example, in Malawi’s 2020 presidential re-run, held after the annulment of the disputed 2019 election, opposition parties successfully united behind Lazarus Chakwera, who won the runoff. While this coalition was praised at the time, it has since faced internal tensions and accusations of prioritising political expediency over reform, revealing the fragility of such alliances.
Similarly, in Kenya’s 2007 and 2013 elections, contested outcomes led to fragile power-sharing arrangements. These were often celebrated as compromises, but ended up entrenching elite interests and sidelining meaningful democratic participation.
In Zimbabwe, the 2008 presidential election saw a violent and controversial runoff. The eventual power-sharing deal between the late former president Robert Mugabe and the late former opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was framed as a political solution, yet it did little to transform governance or strengthen democratic institutions.
Most recently, South Africa’s 2024 general election provides a striking example of the complexities of coalition politics in a fragmented electoral landscape. For the first time since apartheid, the African National Congress (ANC) lost its parliamentary majority, securing only 40% of the vote. This forced the party into forming a Government of National Unity (GNU) with several opposition parties, including its former rival, the Democratic Alliance (DA).
While this was hailed by some as a mature democratic step, critics have warned that the alliance lacks a clear, shared vision and may represent a tactical arrangement to preserve power rather than a genuine commitment to cooperative governance.
The absence of a unifying policy agenda raises concerns about whether such coalitions can deliver meaningful reforms or whether they will simply replicate old patterns of elite accommodation.
These examples show that while runoffs, hung parliaments and coalitions can, in theory, deepen democracy and broaden representation, they are too often reduced to elite-driven arrangements. They rarely produce more accountable leadership or responsive governance, instead, they can reinforce the very political dysfunction they were meant to resolve.
Weak parties, strongmen politics
What is driving this surge of presidential candidates across African elections? At its core, this is a crisis of political institutions. Across the continent, political parties remain weak, incoherent and internally undemocratic.
Too often, they serve personalities, not platforms. Instead of cultivating new leadership, encouraging internal debate or shaping coherent policy agendas, parties become vehicles for individual ambition. The result is a politics driven by ego, not ideology.
As Ken Opalo of Georgetown University notes, African governance systems tend to concentrate power in the presidency, while parties remain fragile and disorganised. In such a system, the presidency becomes the only real centre of power, the ultimate prize.
With few alternative pathways to influence, every politically ambitious figure throws their hat into the ring, regardless of capacity, credibility or public support.
This is why our ballots are bloated. Everyone’s chasing the same seat, because it’s the only one that matters. And as Michael Orwa, a governance expert based in Nairobi, observes, in the absence of strong institutions and amid growing inequality, presidential elections become zero-sum contests.
Disillusioned voters, he notes, begin to internalise the belief that the only way to access national resources is through “their” big man/woman at the top.
Even more troubling is the practice of “planted candidates”, individuals subtly backed by ruling parties or regimes to split the opposition vote, give the illusion of pluralism or crowd out legitimate dissent. This tactic, often invisible to voters, is a direct assault on electoral integrity.
In countries such as Zimbabwe, politics has become a source of income and livelihood due to an unending political and economic crisis. Getting political office thus has very little to do with serving but is very much steeped in self-aggrandisement.
This has fuelled the growth of a new class of political entrepreneurs who use elected office for various transactional activities, making a mockery of the electoral process and politics in general.
What needs to change?
If the goal of elections is to truly deepen democracy in Africa, we must move beyond the simplistic metric of how many people contest the presidency. Democratic progress is not measured by the length of the ballot, but by the quality, credibility and vision of the choices offered to citizens.
As Malawi prepares to vote, and as other countries across the continent approach elections, we must resist the distraction of inflated candidate lists.
Real democracy is not about noise, it’s about clarity. It means presenting voters with genuine alternatives grounded in substance, not spectacle. It means ensuring electoral processes reflect the collective will of the people, not the self-serving ambitions of opportunists gaming a broken system.
Until we confront the deeper dysfunctions, fragile institutions, over-centralised power and politics built on personality over principle, we will continue to confuse performative pluralism with democratic progress.
And the cost will be borne not by those at the top of the ticket, but by the citizens left behind. DM
Tatenda Mazarura is a human rights defender, an election specialist and a regional information and advocacy officer at the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition.