Mr Muluzi, who dubbed himself the "political engineer", sold Mr Mutharika to Malawians as the "economic engineer" and did all the campaigning on behalf of his protege - so much that it was a complete surprise that the two fell out immediately after the elections.
In a very uncomfortable way, Sandy points out the dangers of our devotion to economic efficiency: when you engineer your economy to cut out waste, you design with lowest costs in mind, and redundancy is eliminated.
But anyone who thought that there was going to be a slowdown in infrastructure build-out this year, as the government tries to engineer a soft landing to its spectacular economic growth, need only stare at the Shanghai skyline for a few days, if not just a few minutes.