South African billionaire Zunaid Moti's free schools for Malawi are not actually free

Malawi has been told it is getting 300 schools, 100 clinics and 50 vocational centres for nothing.

The buildings would come from the African Hero Foundation, an organisation financed by the South African businessman Zunaid Moti that builds schools and clinics from prefabricated units, handling the design, manufacturing, construction, equipping and maintenance, and works alongside Jindal Power. Moti chairs the Moti Group and is African Hero's principal backer.

Enock Chihana, Malawi's second vice-president, announced the arrangement at a launch event in Gaborone on Sept. 6, saying the buildings would come at zero cost to governments.

African Hero's own brochure describes something different. Payments, it says, are activated only after delivery.

That is not free. It means the government pays once the buildings are finished rather than never, and the cost lands in a future budget instead of this one.

Moti has called Botswana the first proof point for the model and said Malawi is already showing what comes next.

Botswana signed up first, and its bill has grown.

The foundation originally costed 100 schools there at 3.6 billion pula, about $264 million. Reported figures now put the commitment at 20 billion pula over twenty years, roughly $1.47 billion, which is five and a half times the starting number.

Opposition politicians have called for a parliamentary inquiry. Public sector unions have demanded full disclosure of the financial, legal and contractual terms, including who owns the buildings at the end of it.

Malawi cannot comfortably absorb a surprise of that size. Its public debt already exceeds 90% of the value of everything the economy produces in a year.

The economist Marvin Banda put the problem plainly. If zero upfront cost simply means Malawi starts paying later, he said, then the cost has not been eliminated but moved from today's budget into tomorrow's.

The country has been offered free infrastructure before.

President Lazarus Chakwera announced $6.8 billion of it in 2022, from an organisation called the Bridgin Foundation. The money turned out to be unfinanced and unverified, the scheme was abandoned, and the government was left dealing with what remained. The public finance specialist Dalitso Kubalasa said Malawi cannot afford another Bridgin Foundation and urged officials to verify, cost and scrutinise the terms before committing.

Nobody outside government has seen the contract.

What Botswana has that Malawi does not is a finished building. The first completed project is a school and clinic in Gaborone named after President Duma Boko, who is also African Hero's founding chairperson.

That relationship has attracted its own questions. Moti financed the 2019 election campaign of the coalition Boko leads, which Gaborone's mayor confirmed publicly, and Botswana's finance ministry rejected an earlier version of the proposal as too expensive before the project went ahead. Its permanent secretary told parliament's public accounts committee that the financial implications were huge and that the government was not in a position to borrow to fund it.

Moti has spent years attracting scrutiny elsewhere. He built a Zimbabwean chrome business through African Chrome Fields, spent months in a German prison in 2018 on an Interpol notice that later reporting described as questionable, and faced a series of investigations in 2023 based on leaked internal documents, all of which he rejected as unfounded and defamatory. He resigned as the Moti Group's chief executive that year.