LILONGWE (Reuters) - Malawian Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe on Wednesday credited the International Monetary Fund for bolstering the African nation's foreign reserves and allowing it to reduce domestic debt and interest rates.
Malawi, one of the poorest nations in Africa, is enjoying a modest economic boom that has been sparked by good maize harvests, economic reforms and an increase in aid from Western nations and other international donors.
The IMF has provided the southern African nation $62.1 million in loans under a three-year programme agreed in 2005. The IMF's final payment this week was increased to $24.7 million because of its concerns over Malawi's foreign reserves position.
In a press conference in Lilongwe, Gondwe said the IMF funding enabled the government to absorb the shock of rising fuel and fertiliser costs and help lay the foundation for economic stability.
"It is largely because of the IMF programme and our success in following that programme that we have managed macroeconomic achievement like the deceleration of domestic debt from 25 percent of GDP in 2004 to about 12 percent now," Gondwe said.
"Because of the IMF programme the interest rates have decelerated from 35 percent to 15 percent, inflation from as high as 30 percent to single digits of 7.9 percent."
The country's inflation rate dropped into single digits in early 2007 for the first time in four years, fuelled by lower food prices. That prompted the central bank to continue cutting interest rates.
The government has said it expects the economy to grow by about 7 percent in 2008.
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
Malawi ex-president begins court bid to ascertain come-back bid
Malawi High Court Tuesday began hearing in a case in which former president Bakili Muluzi was being challenged over his eligibility to run as a presidential candidate in next year's general elections, because he has already served the constitutional two consecutive five-year terms.
James Phiri, a member of Muluzi's former ruling United Democratic Front (UDF), sought court intervention on the former president's controversial come-back bid.
"According to the Malawi constitution, the defendant (Bakili Muluzi) is not eligible to stand as a presidential candidate in the forth-coming general elections," Phiri's lawyer, Christopher Chiphwanya, told a three-judge panel.
Chiphwanya told the judges that his client, a bonafide member of the UDF, wants democracy to prevail, noting that this will be impossible if Muluzi was allowed to stand again as president.
"The ambit of the summons are to seek to move this court to find out if the defendant is illegible to be nominated by the party as the party's presidential candidate," he said.
Muluzi, who served two constitutional terms from 1994, was in April overwhelmingly voted by a convention of his former ruling party as the presidential candidate, beating the country's vice president Cassim Chilumpha by 1,950 to 38 votes.
Neither Muluzi nor Phiri appeared in court.
Making a preliminary ruling, Justice Edward Twea said it was premature to bring Muluzi's candidature to court because - although the UDF has nominated Muluzi as candidate - the Malawi Electoral Commission has not received his nomination papers, making him just a presumptive candidate.
"We need to have a consensus on how and when a citizen of this country becomes a presidential candidate under the constitution and other laws," he said.
All presidential aspirants will present nomination papers to the country's electoral commission in January, four months before the 19 May 2009 polls.
However, Kalekeni Kaphale, one of the 24 lawyers representing Muluzi, told the court that it should "determine the dispute now", to allow UDF "to have a lot of certainty as to who is eligible and competent to be their candidate."
According to Kaphale: "The UDF does not want to wait for nomination day as the party may not have the capacity to appoint an alternative."
Judge Twea said the panel would deliver its ruling 25 July.
Solicitor General Anthony Kamanga, who represented the government as an "interested party", told the court the issue about Muluzi's candidacy was "premature as we are not yet there."
"Strictly speaking, I would submit the issue is premature," said Kamanga, adding "I don't think it is yet settled, we are not yet there."
If allowed to contest, Muluzi will be the main challenger to incumbent President Bingu wa Mutharika.
The ex-leader reluctantly handed over power to his chosen successor, Mutharika, having failed to amend the constitution to allow him to stand for a third term, after running his constitutional two five-year terms in 2004.
Muluzi and Mutharika fell out nine months after the elections, with the latter accusing the former of high-level corruption.
Muluzi has since publicly vowed to exact vengeance on the "ungrateful" Mutharika, saying
"I cannot fail to deflate a tyre I personally inflated," alluding to the fact that he single-handedly made Mutharika president.
James Phiri, a member of Muluzi's former ruling United Democratic Front (UDF), sought court intervention on the former president's controversial come-back bid.
"According to the Malawi constitution, the defendant (Bakili Muluzi) is not eligible to stand as a presidential candidate in the forth-coming general elections," Phiri's lawyer, Christopher Chiphwanya, told a three-judge panel.
Chiphwanya told the judges that his client, a bonafide member of the UDF, wants democracy to prevail, noting that this will be impossible if Muluzi was allowed to stand again as president.
"The ambit of the summons are to seek to move this court to find out if the defendant is illegible to be nominated by the party as the party's presidential candidate," he said.
Muluzi, who served two constitutional terms from 1994, was in April overwhelmingly voted by a convention of his former ruling party as the presidential candidate, beating the country's vice president Cassim Chilumpha by 1,950 to 38 votes.
Neither Muluzi nor Phiri appeared in court.
Making a preliminary ruling, Justice Edward Twea said it was premature to bring Muluzi's candidature to court because - although the UDF has nominated Muluzi as candidate - the Malawi Electoral Commission has not received his nomination papers, making him just a presumptive candidate.
"We need to have a consensus on how and when a citizen of this country becomes a presidential candidate under the constitution and other laws," he said.
All presidential aspirants will present nomination papers to the country's electoral commission in January, four months before the 19 May 2009 polls.
However, Kalekeni Kaphale, one of the 24 lawyers representing Muluzi, told the court that it should "determine the dispute now", to allow UDF "to have a lot of certainty as to who is eligible and competent to be their candidate."
According to Kaphale: "The UDF does not want to wait for nomination day as the party may not have the capacity to appoint an alternative."
Judge Twea said the panel would deliver its ruling 25 July.
Solicitor General Anthony Kamanga, who represented the government as an "interested party", told the court the issue about Muluzi's candidacy was "premature as we are not yet there."
"Strictly speaking, I would submit the issue is premature," said Kamanga, adding "I don't think it is yet settled, we are not yet there."
If allowed to contest, Muluzi will be the main challenger to incumbent President Bingu wa Mutharika.
The ex-leader reluctantly handed over power to his chosen successor, Mutharika, having failed to amend the constitution to allow him to stand for a third term, after running his constitutional two five-year terms in 2004.
Muluzi and Mutharika fell out nine months after the elections, with the latter accusing the former of high-level corruption.
Muluzi has since publicly vowed to exact vengeance on the "ungrateful" Mutharika, saying
"I cannot fail to deflate a tyre I personally inflated," alluding to the fact that he single-handedly made Mutharika president.
Saving Mothers, One at a Time
Sue Makin , the newest contributor to this blog, is an American Presbyterian missionary doctor working at a 190-bed mission hospital in southern Malawi. She has been working in Africa for the past 18 years. According to a 2007 study of global maternal mortality rates, more than two-thirds of deaths among Malawian women of reproductive age are linked to pregnancy or childbirth – a larger proportion than in any of the 171 countries in the study.
In spite of – or maybe, because of – the grim statistics on maternal health here in Malawi, a wonderful part of my job is training younger clinicians who will carry on the work after I have left. The lifesaving skills demonstrated by Sam Matandala, a clinical officer in training at our hospital, were a great encouragement to me last month. Clinical officers are the “doctors” who provide most of the care for all the people in Malawi, including emergency obstetrical care. In our district in southern Malawi, which has a population of over half a million people, there are three trained medical doctors, graduates of medical schools. I am one of them, with specialty training in obstetrics/gynecology. The other two are general practitioners and are medical directors of the two hospitals in our district, one a government hospital and the other a mission hospital. Any woman in Malawi with a life-threatening obstetrical emergency needing immediate attention will likely be attended to by a clinical officer or nurse midwife. Medical doctors are few and far between.
On the night in question, Sam ran up against a health-care problem just as typical here as chronic under-funding and dearth of supplies, but perhaps less obvious to Westerners when they think of conditions in Africa: Women are definitely second-class in Malawi.
Around 8 p.m., a nurse midwife called Sam to the maternity ward where he saw a woman covered in blood mixed with soil, unconscious and deathly pale. Her extremities were cold, her pulse faint and her blood pressure an abysmally low 76 over 28. This woman, a mother of three, perhaps in her late 20s, had been three months pregnant with a fourth child. That morning, she had begun bleeding vaginally. Instead of coming to the hospital, her husband had decided to take her to a traditional birth attendant. She stayed with the attendant for nearly six hours, bleeding all the while. After she lost consciousness and the midwife grew frightened, the pregnant woman’s relatives loaded her onto a bush-bicycle ambulance and walked with her for about two hours to get to the hospital. She continued to bleed on the journey to the hospital.
As Sam rightly points out, women in Malawi, regardless of age, are not empowered to make decisions about their own health. When they are sick or giving birth, they must wait for their husband or other male relatives to decide when they should be taken to the hospital. This leads to delays – particularly when the decision-making man has gone far away from the village – and many women who come to the hospital at all come late, when complications have already set in.
In this case, Sam had to act quickly to save the woman’s life. (Calling for me to come from home would have wasted precious time.) He and the nurse midwife started IVs in both arms and drew blood for type and crossmatching. They looked for her relatives in the hope that someone among them would donate blood, but they had run off after dumping her at the hospital, perhaps thinking that she was already dead. Luckily, the lab technician, called from home, found a unit of compatible blood in the blood bank, and a transfusion was started for the woman. The ultrasound by Sam showed that the woman had a partial miscarriage and needed to have all of the products of conception removed from the uterus to stop the bleeding. Due to the woman’s poor condition, going to the operating theater and doing the evacuation of the uterus under full anesthesia was out of the question. So Sam did it right there in the maternity ward under Pethidine, an analgesic like Demerol, and followed up with Pitocin, for her uterus to contract and the bleeding to stop. The next morning, only some nine hours later, the woman was walking around and even asking to go home.
Some have described obstetrics in sub-Saharan Africa as a roller coaster of highs and lows, sometimes terrifying and sad, sometimes unpredictable, always interesting, and very rewarding to those of us who are privileged to participate in the drama of childbirth. This particular story had a happy ending. But the poverty in this area is compounded by poor education. Illiteracy rates are alarmingly high, and girls often drop out of school early. The prevailing belief in this area is that the role of a female in society is to marry, have many children, raise the children, and look to her husband for guidance in all matters. Even as we train more clinical officers and try to improve our medical services to women, we must remember that the environment we work in does not allow the women themselves to have a voice in their choices of health care or where and when they will seek medical help.
In spite of – or maybe, because of – the grim statistics on maternal health here in Malawi, a wonderful part of my job is training younger clinicians who will carry on the work after I have left. The lifesaving skills demonstrated by Sam Matandala, a clinical officer in training at our hospital, were a great encouragement to me last month. Clinical officers are the “doctors” who provide most of the care for all the people in Malawi, including emergency obstetrical care. In our district in southern Malawi, which has a population of over half a million people, there are three trained medical doctors, graduates of medical schools. I am one of them, with specialty training in obstetrics/gynecology. The other two are general practitioners and are medical directors of the two hospitals in our district, one a government hospital and the other a mission hospital. Any woman in Malawi with a life-threatening obstetrical emergency needing immediate attention will likely be attended to by a clinical officer or nurse midwife. Medical doctors are few and far between.
On the night in question, Sam ran up against a health-care problem just as typical here as chronic under-funding and dearth of supplies, but perhaps less obvious to Westerners when they think of conditions in Africa: Women are definitely second-class in Malawi.
Around 8 p.m., a nurse midwife called Sam to the maternity ward where he saw a woman covered in blood mixed with soil, unconscious and deathly pale. Her extremities were cold, her pulse faint and her blood pressure an abysmally low 76 over 28. This woman, a mother of three, perhaps in her late 20s, had been three months pregnant with a fourth child. That morning, she had begun bleeding vaginally. Instead of coming to the hospital, her husband had decided to take her to a traditional birth attendant. She stayed with the attendant for nearly six hours, bleeding all the while. After she lost consciousness and the midwife grew frightened, the pregnant woman’s relatives loaded her onto a bush-bicycle ambulance and walked with her for about two hours to get to the hospital. She continued to bleed on the journey to the hospital.
As Sam rightly points out, women in Malawi, regardless of age, are not empowered to make decisions about their own health. When they are sick or giving birth, they must wait for their husband or other male relatives to decide when they should be taken to the hospital. This leads to delays – particularly when the decision-making man has gone far away from the village – and many women who come to the hospital at all come late, when complications have already set in.
In this case, Sam had to act quickly to save the woman’s life. (Calling for me to come from home would have wasted precious time.) He and the nurse midwife started IVs in both arms and drew blood for type and crossmatching. They looked for her relatives in the hope that someone among them would donate blood, but they had run off after dumping her at the hospital, perhaps thinking that she was already dead. Luckily, the lab technician, called from home, found a unit of compatible blood in the blood bank, and a transfusion was started for the woman. The ultrasound by Sam showed that the woman had a partial miscarriage and needed to have all of the products of conception removed from the uterus to stop the bleeding. Due to the woman’s poor condition, going to the operating theater and doing the evacuation of the uterus under full anesthesia was out of the question. So Sam did it right there in the maternity ward under Pethidine, an analgesic like Demerol, and followed up with Pitocin, for her uterus to contract and the bleeding to stop. The next morning, only some nine hours later, the woman was walking around and even asking to go home.
Some have described obstetrics in sub-Saharan Africa as a roller coaster of highs and lows, sometimes terrifying and sad, sometimes unpredictable, always interesting, and very rewarding to those of us who are privileged to participate in the drama of childbirth. This particular story had a happy ending. But the poverty in this area is compounded by poor education. Illiteracy rates are alarmingly high, and girls often drop out of school early. The prevailing belief in this area is that the role of a female in society is to marry, have many children, raise the children, and look to her husband for guidance in all matters. Even as we train more clinical officers and try to improve our medical services to women, we must remember that the environment we work in does not allow the women themselves to have a voice in their choices of health care or where and when they will seek medical help.
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