JOYCE BANDA, Malawi's former vice-president, surely never imagined that she would make it to the top of her impoverished southern African country of 16m inhabitants, or that it would happen so soon. Expelled from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party in 2010 following her condemnation of President Bingu wa Mutharika's adoption of his brother, Peter, as his heir apparent, she found herself out in the political cold, with her newly formed Peoples Party seemingly making little headway.
But two days after Mr Mutharika's unexpected death from a heart attack on April 8th, the life-long womens-right's advocate and former foreign minister was sworn in as Malawi's first female president. She has lost no time getting down to work. One of her first decisions was to sack her predecessor's hated chief of police, Peter Mukhito. Last June police killed 19 protestors during anti-government demonstrations. Mrs Banda says the late president unleashed a reign of terror against his critics, including arson attacks on their homes, death threats, physical assaults and summary arrests on trumped-up charges.
One of the victims of the state's brutality was Robert Chasowa, a pro-democracy student activist wanted by the police for publishing details of alleged corruption in high places. Mr Chasowa's body was found in the grounds of the University of Malawi's polytechnic campus last September. Police say he jumped to his death. They even produced his suicide note. But it bore no date or signature and got Mr Chasowa's father's name wrong. Apart from a gash to the head, the body showed no evidence of broken bones or ruptured organs. Mrs Banda has now ordered an official investigation.
She has also fired Mr Mutharika's unpopular information minister, Patricia Kaliati. Even before the official announcement of the president's death, Ms Kaliati went on television to inform the world that although Mrs Banda, as vice president, might be legally expected to be next in line, she was not eligible to assume the presidency since she had been chucked out of the ruling party. The country's constitutional lawyers thought otherwise, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberia's president, was soon congratulating her on becoming Africa's second currently serving female leader.
Mrs Banda must now to turn her attention to Malawi's failing economy. After Mr Mutharika was first elected in 2004, it flourished, with growth averaging more than 7% a year. Thanks to generous government subsidies for farm fertilisers, tobacco output, the economy's mainstay, soared and a former big food deficit was turned into a surplus. Child mortality, once among the worlds highest, was halved and the HIV/AIDS pandemic brought under control, All of that has helped Malawi to become one of just four of sub-Saharan Africa's 48 countries deemed likely to meet most of the UN's Millennium Development Goals by 2015.
But after Mr Mutharika's landslide election for a second five-year term in 2009, things began to go awry. With a thumping majority of over two-thirds in parliament, the once widely admired president began to display an increasingly dictatorial streak, postponing local government elections, enacting several unconstitutional laws restricting civil liberties, and intimidating his opponents.
Last June Western donors, who used to give Malawi around $800m a year in aid, suspended all budgetary support in protest against growing human-rights abuses and the government's failure to adhere to the IMF's good-governance conditions for access to its loans. Matters were made worse by a slump in the price of tobacco, the country's second-biggest source of foreign currency after aid, leading to severe shortages of petrol, certain food staples such as sugar and other imported goods. Mrs Banda, who has already promised to work to restore the rule of law and a respect for human rights, is hoping to woo donors back.
Malawians greeted the death of their president with open joy. So, more secretly, did most diplomats. Mrs Banda looks like she is off to a good start.
