The announcement by National Bank of Malawi that it was turning the Kasungu residence of Malawi’s bloodthirsty dictator, Kamuzu Banda, into a tourist hub was welcomed by many as, ironically, a sign of transformative development. My view on Ngulu Ya Nawambe is simple. It should never have been reduced to a tourist gimmick.

Given its deep historical significance, turning it into a site for sightseeing and leisure is a profound mistake. It trivialises the pain associated with its past and undermines the opportunity to repurpose that memory into something transformative.

Ngulu Ya Nawambe should have been turned into a university. Kasungu University. In the era of generative artificial intelligence, machine learning, and large-scale data science, it could have served as a hub for innovation and critical scholarship. Yes, we have the Malawi University of Science and Technology which is now ranked by Times Higher Education as the country’s leading university for research and scholarship. But Malawi needs more than one elite institution. A second national science-focused university in a region like Kasungu would spread opportunity and help unlock regional development.

Turning such a site into a tourist hub is not just a missed opportunity. It is a failure of postcolonial imagination. That is, until one realises who is behind this move. We are witnessing the old elite machinery, now propped up by corporate banking institutions, repackage memory into yet another capitalist project under the false promise of development.

Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney warned us about precisely this pattern. Tourism, they argued, is one of the most meaningless and alienating industries in the postcolony. In the Malawian context, it is perhaps only rivalled by tobacco and inevitably by corruption. It does not uplift. It exploits. It sells nostalgia to the privileged while alienating the poor who live within its shadow. Remember the gated resorts along Lake of Malawi? When you visit the any game reserve, have you ever seen an ordinary folk there. Ever wondered why? Class reinforcement!

Fanon was direct in his assessment: “The national bourgeoisie organises centres of rest and relaxation and pleasure resorts to meet the wishes of the Western bourgeoisie. Such activity is given the name of tourism, and for the occasion will be built up as a national industry…”

Rodney, extending Fanon’s argument, adds: “It is a new way of confirming the dependence and subjugation of Third World economies being transformed into cesspools, which is what the tourism economy is all about.”

Tourism is not neutral. It erodes the revolutionary and transformative potential of a people. In Malawi, it has become the playground of the petty bourgeoisie who, as Fanon and Rodney noted, aspire to mirror their metropolitan counterparts. These are projects that do not speak to the needs or dreams of the rural majority.

Hardly anyone from Kadundu or even from the wider Kasungu district will ever step foot into the revamped Ngulu Ya Nawambe if it is swallowed by the tourism sector. As a university, however, that space could have offered educational access to hundreds if not thousands of Malawians. It could have redefined the country’s intellectual and technological trajectory.

Instead, National Bank and others have positioned themselves as hosts not to the Malawian public but to what Rodney once called their Western opposite numbers. They are not investing in Malawi’s future. They are reinforcing class ties between local elites and foreign capital.

This is not development. It is displacement disguised in the language of progress. In fact, it may well become a conduit for money laundering given the long trail of scandals involving financial institutions in Malawi. Cashgate. This gate. That gate. You name it. Our Banks are allover these scandals.

Ngulu Ya Nawambe deserves better. Reverse the decision. Reimagine that space not as a monument to elite leisure but as a place of learning, innovation, and national renewal. Let it belong to all of Malawi. Not just those who have feasted on public resources in the name of progress. Kasungu University or Ngulu Ya Nawambe University!