By Falles Kamanga
BLANTYRE-(MaraviPost)-We need financial literacy as a subject right from primary school. The problem is financial literacy is picked from the streets and our culture isn’t embedded in financial literacy. Cooperates know fincial literary isn’t available in us as such take advantage of us.
I’ll give you one example”.It’s easier for us to put money together to have a successful weddings, gigantic cultural festivals, beautiful funerals, memorable graduation celeremonies, church activities yet impossible to do the same for investments.
In our culture contributing for spending is highly encouraged and respected, we even compete. If i may ask, how many know how much one should have to open a bank? Many will start googling now. Learning to make money isn’t taken serious in our society but how to spend it everyone is a professor at that.
The Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) regulates all businesses and if your commercials banks make hefty profits that means they spend less on you and you spend more on them. Remeber that banks simply work as your money conduits and they charge you for simply having money, yes you heard me well by having money regardless of how you earned it you owe the banks, it’s strange nha!
Banks are thieves in real sense only that they put their terms in beautiful words like “bank charges, fees, interests” and what have you.
We need to be financially literate to be arguing factually otherwise crying or wondering at the profits commercial banks make will not help us at all.
By the way, do many here know how much money RBM prints annually and how they distribute those bank notes? We’ve been kept outside real financial literacy and are busy fighting as consumers.
RBM and Ministry of finance are the reasons we’re in this finacial distress don’t hate commercial banks. In Etheopia they don’t have foreign banks it’s all about how policies are made by Ministry of Finance.
You can hate FDH but it’s the best bank towards Malawians because it’s operating on our values. If more Malawians can own banks it can be essier to have access to finances but our problem is that even our National Bank which is a public bank it operates like a foreign bank this is because for it to survive on the market it has to follow the same MoF policies controlled by RBM.
The banks like manufacturing accompanies, never pay taxes it’s us the people or consumers who pay taxes on behalf of these banks and manufacturers.
When ministry of finance increases tax on milk for instance to 5% and the milk is selling at K5000 per litre the seller simply adds 5% to that K5000 which makes it to K5250.
This means that the manufacturer feels no pain, still enjoys the maximum profits but the consumer caughs in more paying the tax that was meant for the manufacturer.
Banks work the same way so don’t hate banks we’ve to deal with the problem from the catchment area.
Ministry of Finance (MoF) currently under incompetent Simplex Chithyola Banda is the origin of all these problems with RBM implementing what MoF puts into policy.
This week I was saying the same somewhere that our inability to produce is as a result of many challenges but access to finacial resources. I gave the examples of 4 countries banking interest rates viz;
Seychelles 2.84%
Tanzania 6%
South Africa 6%
Malawi 26%
If you look at these figures it’s clear that too few can get meaningful loans from our commercial banks meaning that we’ll have less producers of goods and services which leads to high demmand and low supply. This beckons higher inflation on the market.
We spend too much time dancing in political parties, speaking in tongues and dancing in religious gatherings and cultural festivals while few are running our economy and they look at the majority of us and smile that they’ll harvest profits.
As a country we’re too far from being business minded. We blame politicians everyday while its us who go and dance for their lies.
Inetu i love Vitumbiko Mumba for being business unusual, he’s kicking the devil where it hurts the most even fellow politicians hate him for that.
Let’s wake up Malawians, put our few kwachas together and go into manufacturing, we can come up with several indigenous banks but all is possible if we part ways with this spending or consumption culture.
Malawi needs competent economists who can fix the ailing economy not what we have currently.
