Lilongwe, March 2 (MaraviPost): Last week Minister of Information, Tourism and Culture Kondwani Nankhumwa feeling superior because of media reports that failed to interpret data which also turned out to be wrongly attributed to the World Bank as ranking Malawi poorest of the poor, said Government plans to train journalists in economic reporting to improve their data interpretation skills.
What is true regardless of the rush by the Malawi Media to embarrass Mutharika and his government once again for data his short-lived government would not have been responsible for, is that Malawi has not done well since independance. There have been flushes but nothing sustained to elevate the lives of Malawians long term.
The Minister disclosed this in Lilongwe during a press briefing where he clarified on reports that Malawi was being rated the poorest country in the World.
Nankhumwa said such kind of erroneous reporting and failure to interpret data is dangerous as it has potential to misinform the citizenry and the international community. While that is true nothing has changed in Malawi, we are still ranked very lowly in all economic indexes.
Standard of living of the Malawi population is still very low compared to most countries within our region.
The issue is not making the best of bad data our problem is how to improve the economic factors so that the data can look better and improve our lives.
Nankhumwa, who was flanked by Presidential Advisors on Communication and Economic Affairs, Bright Malopa and Dr. Collins Magalasi respectively, said the born of contention is failure by the media houses to differentiate between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in US$ currency with GDP per capita in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms.
“These issues are quite different all together, that is why am saying it is very important that as journalists we need to emphasize much on specialized writing or reporting especially in economic reporting and to that effect my ministry is undertaking to get some scholarships which are available now.
“We will be talking to different media houses that they give us candidates within the newsrooms so that they undergo this training in as far as economic reporting is concerned,” said Nankhumwa.
He said, “Failure to interpret data is a serious course of concern in as far as these issues are concerned. One might ask that now what the way forward is because as government we are not saying that we are not poor, we are poor but not the poorest country in the world.”
The aim of the training will also enable journalists to interpret economic data and concentrate on policies that will increase rural production and incomes for instance intensification of agriculture.
If the data is bad no amount of reporter training will improve anything it will just expose the misery index further.
I know that most media houses were excited of this development, however we at the Maravi Post believe this is just window dressing. Improve the factors that will grow the economy and the data will speak for itself.
