Outside the urban areas, politicians built networks and coalitions around rural discontent with state attempts to interfere in people's daily lives, particularly government efforts to conserve natural resources and increase agricultural output. The “second colonial occupation” of Nyasaland (by agricultural experts and conservationists) was marked by “an energy and conviction surpassed only in Kenya.” Government had hoped to undertake agrarian reform in the 1930s, but economic recession made that impossible. This changed in the postwar period when a global oil and fat shortage, combined with Britain's dollar gap and rising primary product prices, provided the incentive and the wherewithal to intervene in agricultural production. Up to that point, state intervention in the economy had been most commonly at the level of distribution (for example, through licensing rules, indirect taxation, and market regulation) rather than production. When the state extended its interventions to the production level after the war, it challenged peasant autonomy not just in the realm of cash crop production but also in food security. It was by addressing these grievances and linking them to the fight against federation that Congress fostered the kind of grassroots populism that became the hallmark of nationalism in Malawi.

The success of the populist strategy is evidenced by the dramatic rise in Congress membership. By 1956, official Congress subscribing members numbered around six thousand (two thousand of whom were anonymous), but government estimated an additional sixty thousand “sympathisers” spread over twenty-four internal and eighteen external branches.