Malawi tobacco farmers face days in the cold amid registration chaos

Thousands of Malawi's poorest tobacco farmers have been left sleeping outdoors in the bitter cold for days on end, as a catastrophic technical meltdown of the country's new registration system plunges the crucial planting season into chaos.

Malawi's 2025/2026 tobacco registration season has descended into utter turmoil, with smallholder growers forced to camp out at registration centres across the country night after night, battling persistent technical failures and a shambolic rollout of the new Know Your Grower (KYG) system.

From Nambuma in Lilongwe, to Kandewu in Ntcheu and Bolero in Rumphi, the horror story is the same everywhere: endless queues, failed fingerprint scanners, collapsed networks, and exhausted farmers reduced to sleeping on sacks outside offices and huddled under trees, desperately waiting for a system that simply refuses to come online.

The registration drive, jointly run by the Tobacco Commission (TC), TAMA Farmers Trust and other stakeholders, was supposed to streamline the grower database, wipe out fictitious "ghost farmers" and improve traceability. Instead, it has become a living nightmare for the very people it was designed to help.

At Bolero, grower Tiwonge Nyirenda revealed the full extent of the ordeal, describing how she arrived at the centre on Monday morning only to still be waiting, unregistered, by Saturday evening.

"I came from deep in the village with money for transport. The officials told us the system is down. The network is failing and the gadgets are not capturing fingerprints.

"We have been told to wait. For three nights we have been sleeping here on sacks outside the EPA office. We have no food, we have no blankets. This is not how we should be treated," Nyirenda said.

She revealed that desperate farmers begin arriving as early as 4am, only to be repeatedly told the system is "offline" — leaving many trapped in a punishing cycle of waiting with nowhere to go.

Another grower, who declined to be named, painted an even bleaker picture, describing farmers from remote areas like Hewe forced to spend more than four days camped at the centre, burning through money meant for fertiliser just to survive.

"We are poor farmers. We budgeted K20,000 for transport, but now we have spent double because we are sleeping at the trading centre. The officers only register 15 people per day when we are hundreds," the grower said.

The devastating scenes are being repeated across Ntcheu and Lilongwe too, with growers everywhere reporting they have completely exhausted the meagre funds they had set aside for transport and food.

At Nambuma EPA, farmer Ashan Mangani could barely contain his fury at the timing of the fiasco.

"We are being punished. And what is more painful is that this year's tobacco market has been the worst. And then we have this!" Mangani fumed.

Growers and field officers across all three districts point to a catalogue of failures behind the collapse: constant system downtime where registration gadgets fail to sync with the central server, biometric scanners unable to capture the fingerprints of elderly farmers, chaotically understaffed centres lacking basic power backup and internet connectivity, and a total communication vacuum leaving farmers with no idea when, or if, the system will ever stabilise.

One field officer in Ntcheu, speaking on condition of anonymity, admitted the system had been rolled out before proper testing.

"We are embarrassed because farmers think we are the ones delaying them, but it is the system. Sometimes it logs in for 30 minutes and goes off for the whole day," he confessed.

TC spokesperson Telephorus Chigwenembe said he needed more time to "establish what is happening," though sources within the Commission privately admitted there have been "intermittent connectivity challenges," particularly in rural EPAs.

For countless growers, the chaos threatens far more than mere inconvenience — it puts their entire livelihoods on the line.

Without registration, farmers cannot be allocated a quota, cannot access vital inputs on loan, and cannot sell their crop at auction floors next year.

"Last year we were told to register early. Now we have come early and we are being punished. If I am not registered, what will I do with my nursery? The rains are coming," one desperate farmer at Kandewu lamented.

Farmer representative bodies, including TAMA Farmers Trust, have voiced serious alarm that the botched registration could result in dangerously low grower numbers being recorded, throwing off vital production estimates and market planning for the entire season.

"If this continues, many genuine smallholder growers will be left out. The Commission must urgently fix the system, decentralize further, and provide mobile registration teams instead of forcing farmers to sleep at EPAs for a week," warned another farmer from Nambuma.

As of Saturday evening, growers at Bolero remained huddled desperately around a small fire, still waiting anxiously to discover whether the system would finally return to life on Monday.