……As four million people face hunger
BLANTYRE-(MaraviPost)-The opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has accused President Lazarus Chakwera’s Tonse Alliance-Malawi Congress Party (MCP) government of lacking a proper economic management plan which the former governing party says has left close to 4 and half million people at risk of starvation this year.
Addressing a press conference on Monday, August 28, 2023, in Blantyre, the party’s top officials said the Chakwera’s Tonse government, which campaigned on a promise of taking the people to the biblical ‘sweet land of Canaan’, is now instead leading Malawians into a deep economic abyss.
In his remarks, the party’s Vice President for the Eastern Region Bright Msaka said since taking office three years ago, MCP and its alliance partners have delivered nothing but a bag of empty promises, adding that Dr. Lazarus Chakwera is “just an orator and not a president.”
Msaka, who is also a Member of Parliament (MP) for Machinga Likwenu Constituency, called on Chakwera to trim his club of advisors and the cabinet, adding that it is a shame for Chakwera and his political henchmen to continue to preside over people they cannot even feed.
“Why should Malawians keep Chakwera at the state house when he cannot feed them?” Msaka said.
About 4.4 million people are in desperate need of food aid this year as the country faces a grain deficit of about 120, 000 metric tonnes due to a poor harvest mainly caused by a botched government fertilizer subsidy program and weather-related shocks.
He said MCP is planning to rig the 2025 general elections but assured Malawians that these plans will not bear fruits as “no government in the world that is unpopular can win any election.”
On his part, DPP economic guru Dalitso Kabambe, who is a former governor of the Reserve Bank of Malawi, accused MCP of ruining the economy by running an incompetent monetary policy that he said has pushed up inflation and interest rates to a record high of 28 percent and 24 percent respectively.
Kabambe said the MCP government has developed a huge appetite to borrow for consumption which he says has driven the sick economy deeper into distress.
“The government is indecisive on how to tackle the economy,” said Kabambe.
Taking his turn, the party’s spokesperson Shadric Namalomba said since MCP and its partners came to power in 2020, corruption has become the order of the day and is rife at top levels of government at State House and in the office of the president and cabinet (OPC).
Namalomba said the fallacy of creating one million jobs has become a pipe dream as more Malawians have lost their jobs in the last three years, citing the closure of Rainbow Television and Multichoice Malawi as some of the recent incidences that have led to job losses.
Lamenting the erosion of the healthcare system in the country, Thyolo Thava Member of Parliament Mary Navitcha said hospitals now are death traps as the government has stopped providing meals to the patients and guardians.
She said patients admitted in the country’s referral centers are now buying their medicines in pharmacies because hospitals have been hit by a serious shortage of drugs that has left the majority of the poor vulnerable.
Chakwera must leave Malawians in the hands of able people