The occasion was his departure for South Africa – a private visit, his fourth in seven months, though the President did not pause to explain what draws him there so regularly. Malawi’s economy, he said, is “almost successful, maybe halfway” – a phrase that manages to claim credit and hedge against scrutiny in the same breath. Indicators, he assured his audience, point “in the right direction.” This is, of course, a familiar posture for a leader who has governed before and knows the value of patience as a political argument. Mutharika’s insistence that recovery “takes time” and cannot happen “overnight” draws implicitly on his 2014-2020 tenure, when similar assurances met with rather mixed results.