Early Career
Tembo was born on September 14, 1932 in Dedza District, Central Region. His father, Zenus Ungapake Tembo, was a minister of the Church of Central African Presbyterian (CCAP). He attended several primary schools before graduating to Blantyre Secondary School. He later went to study at the University of Roma in Lesotho, graduating in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts in political philosophy. He had a brief stint as a teacher at Dedza Secondary School and later taught for two years at Robert Blake Secondary School in the central region district of Dowa in 1958.
In 1960, two years after Dr. Banda's arrival in the country from Ghana to lead the independence struggle from the British colonial rule, Tembo was invited to take up a parliamentary seat in Dedza South constituency, a seat he has occupied to this day.
Tembo was elected to the legislative assembly of Nyasaland in 1961, three years before the country gained its independence and became the Republic of Malawi. He was the second Minister of Finance in Malawi after independence, succeeding Henry Phillips (later Sir Henry Phillips) in a post for which the intended candidate had been Dunduzu Chisiza; (Chisiza died in 1962 in a car crash). John Tembo was the only cabinet member not to resign in the notorious "Cabinet Crisis" of 1964, after which most of the President's closest lieutenants, their opposition to his policies thwarted, fled the country. (Chinua Achebe in 'A Man of the People' admits having used a real situation gleaned from the Hansards of a certain African country to portray his main character 'Chief Nanga', the heckler in parliament who hounded out the 'offensive minister' who had just resigned. Chief Nanga got one of the leftover ministerial post! One wonders which Hansards and which backbencher heckler Chinua Achebe was referring to!)
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