Malawi clerics urge ex-ruler Muluzi withdraw from poll

Mon 18 Feb 2008, 16:00 GMT

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By Mabvuto Banda

LILONGWE, Feb 18 (Reuters) - Former Malawi President Bakili Muluzi should withdraw from next year's presidential election in the interests of democracy, an influential group of Christian and Muslim clerics in the African nation said on Monday.

Muluzi, who stepped down in 2004 after unsuccessfully trying to change the constitution and run for a third consecutive term, announced last year he would challenge incumbent President Bingu wa Mutharika on behalf of the United Democratic Front party.

"Muluzi had his time and we ask him to withdraw his intentions to contest again in next year's elections," Rev. Boniface Tamani, head of the Public Affairs Committee (PAC) clerical lobby, said in a statement.

"His intentions may undermine the achievements that the country has made so far and destroy the confidence with the country's donors," Tamani said.

Clerics have played an important political role in Malawi. Calls by Christian leaders for the government to respect democracy and human rights helped pave the way for the 1994 departure of longtime strongman Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

But Kennedy Makwangwala, the UDF's secretary-general, dismissed the clerics' request. "UDF supporters are the ones that want Muluzi and not the churches," he told Reuters.

Muluzi was hailed as a hero in Malawi, one of the world's poorest nations, for ousting Banda, a victory that appeared to mark the end of authoritarian rule in the country of 13 million people.

But a decade later he was defeated in an unsuccessful bid for an unconstitutional third, five-year term amid growing tensions with Western donors who account for a large chunk of the country's finances.

Relations between Muluzi and wa Mutharika, his successor, have deteriorated since the incumbent launched an anti-corruption drive that netted a number of Muluzi's allies. Muluzi was briefly arrested in 2006 in the crackdown.

It is not clear whether the former Malawi leader will be free to run again under the Constitution, which limits the president to two terms but says nothing about whether the restriction applies to former rulers.

Malawi's Constitutional Court is expected to rule on the matter. Muluzi and his supporters in the UDF have said they believe that the constitutional limit applies to consecutive presidential terms.

Wa Mutharika, who quit the UDF after winning the 2004 poll and formed the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), is likely to stress his government's economic achievements in his re-election bid. Inflation and interest rates have fallen and harvests have been generally good under his rule.

Muluzi says prosperity has not trickled down to many Malawians.

UDF loyalists in parliament have made several attempts to impeach wa Mutharika, while police have accused UDF figures of plotting to have the president assassinated. The DPP has a minority of the seats in Malawi's parliament. (Editing by Paul Simao and Giles Elgood)

Fundraiser for Malawi and UN draws top celebrities

MADONNA and Gucci sought to open the minds and wallets of dozens of celebrities on Wednesday night, raising R28 million ($3.7m) for efforts they said would help orphaned children with HIV/Aids in Malawi and poor children in other nations.

The star-studded benefit dinner and live auction, hosted by Chris Rock under a big tent on the north lawn of the United Nations, made for an unusual – and, to some inside the UN, uneasy – blend of diplomacy, fashion and commercial promotion.

Organisers said the proceeds would be collected by the Gucci Foundation, a registered charity, and split among Raising Malawi, an advocacy group that operates under The Kabbalah Centre International, and the US Fund for Unicef, which supports the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Gucci, which paid the costs, pegged the event to the opening of its Manhattan flagship store on 5th Avenue, but was not given permission to use the UN logo in its advertising.

“I’ve earned a reputation for many things: Pushing the envelope, for being a provocateur, for never taking no for an answer. For endlessly reinventing myself, for being a cult member, a kidnapper. For being ambitious, outrageous and irreverent. And for never settling for second best,” Madonna told the dinner guests.

“But I don’t just want you to write me a cheque. I’m more interested in your heart. I want to take you on that journey with me tonight. I want you to feel as inspired as I do right now,” she said. “Yes, I want to raise Malawi. But if I can do that – if we can do that – then the sky’s the limit.”

Madonna has tried to help Malawi orphans since she and her husband, Guy Ritchie, began raising a Malawian boy they want to adopt. Rights groups questioned her actions since she took him from an orphanage in 2006 when he was a year old.

According to Unicef, HIV/Aidsaffects almost one million people in Malawi, including 83000 children, and half of the country’s 1m orphans have lost one or both parents to Aids.

“Malawi faces four urgent challenges: Food security, education, disease control and infrastructure,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

A red carpet reception drew stars such as Drew Barrymore, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, Amy Adams, Brooke Shields, Salma Hayek, Djimon Hounsou, Dita von Teese and Unicef ambassadors Tea Leoni and Lucy Liu; followed by a cocktail party with the likes of real estate magnate Donald Trump and media mogul Barry Diller.

Celebrities paid between R20000 and R75000 each to dine on grappa-cured salmon, wild striped bass, tart of goat cheese, foraged mushrooms, truffled mashed potatoes and sticky toffee pudding with creme fraiche.

Madonna played videos of Malawi and introduced children from the country. Rihanna, Timbaland and Alicia Keys played music afterwards.

“It was an extraordinary evening. The whole evening was quite moving,” Tom Cruise told reporters. His wife, Katie Holmes, agreed.

Cruise called the United Nations “an absolute necessity” because of the staff who dedicate their lives to building peace.

Cruise bid R750000 for a sports package that included the privilege of hanging out at baseball’s Yankee Stadium with Alex Rodriguez and a private hour playing soccer with David Beckham, but lost out to a bidder who ponied up R2.6m.

A trip to Paris with a tour of a vineyard and lunch with Hayek and her husband, French industrialist Francois-Henri Pinault, went for R900500. The priciest auction item was a R4.5m winning bid to tour with Madonna and take a dance class with her and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Security was tight and few reporters were allowed inside the dinner. Though it is a UN agency, Unicef’s operations are overseen by an independent board that doesn’t answer to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who had skipped town by the time the celebrities arrived.

The UN chief wanted to distance himself from the event due to questions about the commercialism and unfamiliarity with Raising Malawi, according to UN officials.

Ban was travelling to Chicago for two days of meetings. The US Fund for Unicef said on Wednesday there is “no formal relationship between Raising Malawi and Unicef”.

Alicia Barcena Ibarra, Ban’s undersecretary general for administration and management, said her office “should have investigated more fully” before it approved Unicef’s request to hold the event.

Ban told reporters on Tuesday he was confident there would be no problems. “I understand that the main purpose of this event will raise funds for a humanitarian purpose, and I am sure that the proceeds will go to the purpose of this event,” he said. — Sapa-AP

Fair Trade Hopes Take Root

Can Malawi's newly empowered farmers transform one of the world's poorest countries?

• Nick Mathiason
• The Observer,
• Sunday January 27 2008

This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday January 27 2008 on p6 of the Business news & features section. It was last updated at 23:17 on January 26 2008.

The district hospital at Mchinji in Malawi was built nearly 20 years ago to serve a population of 275,000. It is a modern complex that, from the outside, would not look out of place in any British city. The trouble is that it's drowning under a sea of patients.

Mchinji lies in the far west of Malawi where the Zambian and Mozambican borders meet. The sick swarm over the borders and swell the hospital's catchment area to more than 600,000. With a population of 13 million, Malawi has the lowest number of doctors per person in the world; a 17-bed children's ward will typically treat at any one time 185 kids suffering, and often dying, from malaria, pneumonia or anaemia.

The sick children are accompanied by a parent - or, just as likely, a guardian, because Aids has sunk its claws into the people who farm this fertile land. Consequently, life expectancy has reduced from 45 in 1990 to 37 in 2005. Virtually every adult you meet looks after at least one Aids orphan, more likely several.

But Mchinji District Hospital has no beds for those accompanying the sick, let alone cooking or washing facilities. So opposite the hospital, gathered on scrubby grass, are hundreds of women and children at the mercy of the elements. Some are pregnant, waiting to go into labour.

Yet here at Mchinji, contrary to perception, all is not lost. Three weeks ago, work started on a brick shelter to protect parents, guardians and expectant mothers from the sheeting rain and scorching sun. Progress has been rapid: the foundations have been laid and the structure is rising out of the ground. Work should finish soon. What's remarkable is that the shelter has been paid for by nuts - fair-trade groundnuts, grown in Malawi and sold to British shoppers.

The story is repeated across this southern African nation: infrastructure improvements and better life chances are being paid for by fair trade: new homes, water pumps and pipes, electricity, repaired bridges and bursaries to secondary school for orphans. Fair trade is, in a sense, the purest form of aid and the British public knows it. Government surveys show that people believe it is more effective than giving to charity. Growers are paid a guaranteed payment above world market price for their goods and smallholders form democratic associations that receive a premium to invest in improving communities.

This does not mean fair trade is a soft touch. 'Abuse the windfall and lose the Fairtrade mark' is no idle threat - accreditors constantly monitor projects. Smallholders in Cameroon have been thrown out of the scheme in the recent past; there is no stronger incentive to keep on the straight and narrow. Contrast this with traditional donor aid, up to 40 per cent of which is frittered away by consultants, while much of the rest is tied to murky procurement conditions that stipulate developing countries must import goods from the donor country.

Although it is a fledgling concept in Malawi, a growing number of smallholders have formed themselves into associations to sell tea, sugar, cotton and nuts to processors who can't get enough of Fairtrade products as the sector booms.

Next month the Fairtrade Foundation, which is the accreditation wing of the movement, will reveal that UK consumers annually spend more than £450m on fair-trade goods. In 16 years, fair trade has become one of the fastest-growing retail sectors. Brands such as CafeDirect and Divine chocolate have become household names. The latest launch is Liberation Nuts.

The leaders of the movement are now intent on a rapid acceleration, taking the sector beyond the billion-pound mark in short order - and they are going to concentrate on the least-developed countries, such as Malawi. In fact, the signs are that the Fairtrade Foundation movement will use Malawi as a pilot.

But to do this requires small and strategic investments in capacity-building, quality management systems and accreditation monitors. Processors and retailers complain that it takes a long time to be approved to supply Fairtrade products. The Fairtrade Foundation and retailers are lobbying the Department for International Development to come up with small amounts of extra cash to help kick-start change in poor countries. Since 2003, Dfid has granted just £2.1m to the Fairtrade Foundation and its international parent body.

What can be achieved is clear: when the foundation was given £250,000 from the department five years ago, it was able to increase its range of products from 100 or so to several thousand.

What started as a fringe movement championed by unions, church groups and the Co-op chain has been adopted by some of Britain's major retailers - Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose. Sainsbury's and M&S have made giant strides in the past two years: Sainsbury's own-label tea is Fairtrade and the supermarket has committed to ensuring its price will stay in line with rivals' own-brand tea. All its bananas are Fairtrade and it is moving all its sugar the same way.

Last year, M&S purchased around a third of the world's Fairtrade cotton and sold more than 3.2 million garments made from it; all its jams and conserves use Fairtrade sugar. Waitrose has a similarly impressive story to tell.

The question that worries fair-trade leaders as the economy enters increasingly choppy waters is: will the supermarkets be able to invest in supply chains to ensure ambitious expansion plans can be achieved? It is a concern quickly allayed by the bosses of Sainsbury's, M&S and Waitrose, who insist there is no going back on their commitment.

For the people of Lujeri, in the shadow of Mount Mulanje, Malawi's highest peak, such talk is music to their ears. Here 6,000 smallholder farmers are poised to receive $800,000 (£404,000) once they get Fairtrade accreditation, which should come within months. The money is desperately needed: the women farmers say they go without food to ensure their children go to school, and that poverty creates the conditions for prostitution and Aids to spread. Money will go towards new medical facilities and bursaries for secondary schools.

If Malawi can scale up and take advantage of the fair-trade boom, it will be a remarkable turnaround. Until 2004, commodities were sold to the government, but liberalisation brought a catastrophic drop in prices. Smallholders were left exposed to duplicitous middlemen who conned growers by fixing weighing scales and altering the size of bags so they did not have to pay farmers what they were entitled to.

But by banding together - the motto of the National Smallholder Farmers' Association of Malawi is 'The future belongs to the organised' - farmers can achieve better prices, and benefit from training and quality management systems to ensure products meet standards.

It is a route out of poverty built on equity and entrepreneurialism. It is also a route that, now more than ever, needs to be backed by the British government.

The nation

Under President Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi has stabilised its economy, although it is one of the world's poorest nations. Most people live on less than 50p a day. Rampant inflation, now 7.4 per cent, has been tamed and interest rates are roughly 25 per cent. The economy is dominated by agriculture, although uranium finds, now being exploited, will add significantly to GDP. Severe drought in 2004 led to hunger.

Malawi is split between three main tribes. Fears are growing that elections in 2009 could see a repeat of the chaos in Kenya. Despite opposition claims of corruption, most believe Mutharika's record of economic competence should see him win

Congrats Mr. President

by Ephraim Munthali

I am one of President Bingu wa Mutharika’s fierce critics but I also admire him a lot. My long held view—which I will always defend even with my last breath—is that Mutharika is not the best leader we can have in a democratic country like Malawi.

In the three years he has been in power, his ‘I don’t-give-a-damn’ style of leadership has polarised the country so much that his reign has never been smooth as he presides over a country split into warring camps but he is too pre-occupied with himself to notice.

The opposition see in the President a man whose dictionary does not stock the word compromise. Thus, they too want to show him that they are made of steel. It’s a futile tag of war which, were Mutharika a good leader, he should have seen and written off as such.

In his quest to get his way at all cost, Mutharika has raped the Constitution so repeatedly that the country’s most important book after the Bible may need long hours in the operating theatre to be stitched back to normal without leaving a deep wound that could keep hurting Malawi for generations to come. In short, his governance record in the short period he has tasted power is appalling to say the least.

But his leadership faults aside, the man is a good manager who delivers his pledges in most cases and has pumped life into an economy that was on its death bed for too long as it awaited the eventual death that any run down economy meets—a crisis point.

Of course, most people say they have voted him Nation Achiever—which does not normally entertain politicians by the way—because of his charity work through organisations such as the Silver Grey Foundation.

But the truth is that the man’s strategic management of the economy and the food situation in the country has made him so popular both among the middle class and the poor that any opportunity to show just how grateful people are will see the President at the summit of every popularity related vote.

Whatever the case, however, this is a well deserved recognition of the man who has restored pride and self belief in us as a people; regained for us the respect of our neighbours and the larger international community; taught us that it’s possible to live again; that instead of feeling sorry for ourselves, we can do something about our poverty; and has given us reason to think positively about the future.

Congratulations Mr. President. I hope that this award will also go a long way in helping you work on the other weaknesses that your opponents pounce on to derail your good progress and discredit your person and efforts.

Don’t be a boss but a leader Mr. President. The difference is that leaders are servants of the people, including their critics and opponents while bosses turn the people to be their servants. This is something I ask you to reflect on in 2008. Happy New Year, Sir.

Malawi impresses IMF--gets US$18 m
By GERALD NAMWAZA - 19 December 2007 - 13:05:38

INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund (IMF) Monday approved a US$18.1 million (about K2.6 billion) disbursement to Malawi under Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) arrangement.

The executive board of the IMF says it was compelled to dish out the cash after Malawi successfully met the economic targets in the fourth and fifth review of the three year programme started in 2005.

“The completion of the review enables the release of SDR 11.45 million (about US$18.1 million), bringing total disbursements under the arrangement to SDR 33.4 million (about US$52.9 million),” reads part of the IMF statement.

Following the executive board discussion on Malawi, Takatoshi Kato, Deputy Managing Director and Acting Chair praised the country for its unflinching resolve to grow the economy.

"Malawi has shown commendable performance under its PRGF-supported program. Economic growth remains high and inflation has continued to decline. This should continue to support Malawi's poverty reduction and development efforts,” Kato says.

This should come as good news to Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe, who last month in Blantyre, told journalists the economy was on the right track and that the IMF was impressed with the country’s progress.

Inflation has gone down from 9.6 percent in January this year and was at 7.2 percent in October while the local economy is estimated to grow at about 7 percent, a situation that prompted Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) to cut the bank rate from 17.5 percent to 15 percent last month.


"The domestic debt burden has declined further, though somewhat less rapidly than expected. Fiscal policy implementation has been supported by strong revenue performance, and the recent improvement in the government's control of payroll execution has facilitated the lifting of the program's ceiling on the wage bill,” says the IMF statement.


However, IMF says government's domestic borrowing targets came under pressure from unforeseen challenges, including delays in aid disbursements and unexpectedly high interest payments.

"The improvement in the macroeconomic environment has permitted the monetary authorities to bring inflation down to single digits while maintaining a stable exchange rate. Inflation is expected to remain in single figures.

However, monetary policy implementation came under some strain in mid-2007, and the authorities need to address the ensuing rapid monetary expansion.

"The program envisages economic growth in 2007 /08 spreading beyond the agricultural sector and remaining high. Further declines in the domestic public debt burden should continue to support robust private sector credit growth,” Kato says in the statement.

The IMF, has since advised government to put greater emphasis on structural reforms and improve public financial management in addition to creating a better business environment.

The three-year PRGF arrangement for Malawi was approved on August 5, 2005, for a total amount of SDR 38.2 million (about US$60.4 million) to support the government's economic program for 2005-2007 after being suspended in 2001 when the previous government went off track.