About Lazarus Chakwera
At the APO 2026 summit in Brussels, President Lazarus Chakwera delivered a presidential address calling for Africa to shift from aid dependency to sovereign agency. He described three forces for the continent's future: resilience, strategic alliances, and investment in production over humanitarian programs. Chakwera criticized what he termed a "new geopolitical attitude" in Western democracies that seeks to destroy alliances, likening it to "an old spirit of King Leopold trying to make a comeback," and argued that such isolationism is "doomed to fail" because the world is irreversibly interconnected.
Chakwera stated that African nations must prioritize their own investments in areas such as modern transport infrastructure, state institutional capacity, economic zones, and digital technologies, saying "it is not acceptable for a parent to claim that they value the education of their children and go around asking other people for school fees" while spending on other items. He noted that he and other heads of state had negotiated a change in the African Union-European Union relationship from a donor-recipient model to a "partnership of equals," embodied in the Global Gateway package. He also pointed to unfinished continental integration, including open borders and a common payment system for the African Continental Free Trade Area.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Lazarus Chakwera's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Lazarus Chakwera0:13
On previous occasions on this grounds, I have shared with you my vision to achieve job creation, wealth creation, and food security. I have shared with you that all three of these goals require our considered efforts to boost production and manufacturing of goods in agriculture, tourism, and mining for export. I have shared with you that in readiness for the boom in agricultural production and manufacturing that is coming in this near future, off the back of such initiatives as Affordable Inputs Program (AIP), the Agricultural Commercialization Project (AGCOM), the Shire Valley Transformation Project, the Mega Farms initiative, and the dozens of irrigation schemes around the country, we are going around the world signing deals to secure offtaker markets for our farmers' produce, including markets in Europe where I just came from, markets in Asia where I will be going next week, markets in America where I will be going end of the month or next month, and markets in Africa where we are signing as many deals as we can to secure these deals to take full advantage of the African Continental Free Trade Area that aims at increasing the amount of trade between African countries. I have shared with you that in our pursuit of new trade deals with African countries to secure markets here on the continent for our products, we need to start with securing trade and cooperation deals with the neighboring countries with whom we share our border, which is why I visited all of our neighboring countries within my first six months in office. I have shared with you that in our building of trade relations within the neighborhood, Malawi is part of the country with which we share more of our border than any other is Mozambique, a country of strategic importance to our long-term strategic goals because of its strategic access to the sea. I have shared with you that in order to leverage this semi-twin brother we are connected to, we must not only build solid and sustainable diplomatic relations that create the necessary trust and terms of engagement for trade, but we must also build both the necessary transport infrastructure to give Malawi access to the Mozambican market and the sea, as well as the necessary energy infrastructure to power our shared interest in industrialization. Which is why under my administration, you have seen the signing on implementation of the Mozambique-Malawi or MOMA power interconnection project, the signing and implementation of broad construction projects to open up the corridors between Malawi and Mozambique, the signing and implementation of agreements that give Malawi greater access to the port of Nacala. Crucially, this is also why under my administration you have seen the revamp of rail transportation between Malawi and Mozambique, with Malawians born this century seeing a cargo train arrive in Lilongwe from Matola, Mozambique for the first time in their lives.
