Malawi’s small scale traders selling their merchandise at Limbe market in Blantyre. Credit: Lameck Masina/IPS

By Lameck Masina
BLANTYRE, Malawi, Jun 11 2020 (IPS)

Malawi remains one of the few nations in the world that has not gone into a coronavirus lockdown as the government rushes to meet the conditions of a court order to implement a cash transfer scheme for the poor before doing so. But as some parts of the world are slowing coming out of their lockdowns, it could be likely this southern African nation won’t go into one as the rerun of the country’s presidential election nears. 

On Apr. 27, President Peter Mutharika announced the roll out of a multimillion dollar emergency cash transfer exercise aimed to cushion the peri urban poor from the impact of the coronavirus.

Mutharika said the $51 million bailout initiative targeted 172,000 households in the cities of Lilongwe, Blantyre, Mzuzu and Zomba.

The exercise, which was expected to roll out in May, was in response to demands from civil rights organisations, who obtained a court injunction against a planned 21-day lockdown scheduled to start Apr. 18, outlining the lack of measures to cushion the country’s vulnerable. The court ruled the cash transfer scheme be implemented and a lockdown would be suspended until then.

Under the World Bank-funded programme, beneficiaries will receive MK35, 000 (about $47) a month, for six months.

Country’s vulnerable still waiting

Widow Elizabeth Longwe has been earning her daily income by selling tomatoes at Limbe market in Blantyre. But since the country confirmed its first case of coronavirus on Apr. 2, her daily sales have reduced by almost half.

Her customers stopped purchasing from her for fear of contracting the virus, which has killed over 400,000 people across the globe.

“Instead, people started buying things in bulk and using them sparingly, making it difficult for small scale businesses like mine to enjoy the same kind of sales one would do on a normal day,” she tells IPS.

The mother of three says she “thanks God” that her lack of sales came after the government suspended schools in response to the pandemic.

“It would have been a disaster to me because I couldn’t have managed to provide transport money for my two older children to school daily. But still, my worry was how I would manage to feed my children,” she says.

But she had been hopeful for financial assistance when the cash transfer scheme was been announced.

So too was Lackson Tembo, who trades in second-hand clothes, also at Limbe Market.

“This was a relief to me because with this meant I would still be feeding my children. I would be able to buy soap for washing and bathing. I would be able to pay my monthly rent,” Tembo tells IPS.

Where is the money?

But Tembo and Longwe, who are among the first beneficiaries listed for the cash transfers, are yet to receive the money. And they have not been informed why. They fear that remarks by the country’s Vice President Saulos Chilima, who said at a political rally in May that donors have withheld the funds for fear of abuse, may in fact be true.

However, spokesperson for the Treasury Department in the Ministry of Finance Williams Banda tells IPS that the funds are there but disbursement is delayed because they have been working on “implementation modalities”.

“The World Bank was targeting the peri-urban hotspots of the major cities … [but] when the technical committee looked at the list, they noted that the targeted beneficiaries [vulnerable groups] were not on the lists,” says Banda.

Banda says this forced the technical committee to suspend the listing and start engaging with “the ones who do the normal social cash transfer, to get to those who are indeed vulnerable and very poor individuals in the peri-urban hot spots”.

Lockdown versus elections

However, many still doubt if the lockdown will ever take off as political leaders intensify their campaign rallies ahead of the country’s presidential re-run, expected to be held on Jul 2.

• Malawi is expected to go polls after the Constitutional Court nullified the country’s May 21, 2019 presidential elections citing massive and systematic irregularities, including the use of correctional fluid on the ballots. 
• In its verdict on February 3, the court ordered fresh polls within 150 days, which ends on July 3. Parliament, which is currently sitting in the capital Lilongwe, is expected to set a date for the fresh polls.

But at a political rally on Saturday, Jun. 6, in the Zomba City in southern Malawi, former President Joyce Banda accused the government of exaggerating figures of COVID-19 cases.

Malawi has so far confirmed 455 COVID-19 cases with 4 deaths and 55 recoveries. 

“Since April, we have only registered four deaths, and recently we saw the government faking people suffering from the coronavirus, to find an excuse to postpone the election through a lockdown, but still, more are recovering.

“Let’s just thank God that we have been spared from this pandemic rather than deliberately bloating cases to attract donor money,” she had said.

Her remarks were an echo of what other opposition leaders have been saying; that the government should forget imposing a lockdown as Malawians are eager to go to polls.

Cash transfer to start soon … but what of COVID-19 testing?

While it is uncertain if the country will ever go into a lockdown, Minister of Population Planning and Social Welfare Clara Makungwa tells IPS that with or without the lockdown, the emergency cash transfer will still roll out because of the increasing number of people impacted by COVID-19. This includes migrant workers who are returning home, as well as those who are unable to run their businesses as people implement their own social distancing measures here.

“Figures for those affected are getting bigger and bigger now. For example we have 17 busses coming soon with people [migrant workers who were stranded in South Africa because of the lockdown there] who are coming back home, they are helpless. Those that have businesses are suffering. They are not enjoying the usual business as they were doing before. These people still need assistance,” she tells IPS. 

Makungwa says some of the issues which delayed the roll out of the programme have been resolved and expectation is that the exercise would start by the end of this month.

“We needed to train the enumerators, brief the block leaders because they are the ones to benefit and also work with city councils.  So we have come that far and we are now ready for the enumerators to go round doing the enlisting and the programme will roll out,” says Makungwa.

However a lecturer in economics at Malawi Polytechnic, Betcheni Tchereni, tells IPS that although the cash transfer would help mitigate the impact of the virus on the poor, efforts to contain the spread of the virus should also be funded.

“The best thing that we should do is procure enough testing kits and make sure that pretty much everybody has been tested. That way then it will be alright and make sure that porous borders have been closed. Because you have seen that most of the people have been affected or infected because of someone who travelled from abroad,” Tchereni tells IPS.

Malawi with a population of about 18 million has just tested 13 COVID-19 testing sites according to the Public Health Institution of Malawi. About 6,000 people have far been tested.

By Lameck Masina
BLANTYRE, Malawi, Jan 3 2011 (IPS)

Health rights activists in Malawi are expressing concern over the recent rejection of the country’s proposal for close to six hundred million dollars to the Global Fund to fight HIV, tuberculosis and malaria between 2011 and 2016.

But the government maintains there is no need for concern. Executive Secretary for Malawi Global Fund Coordinating Committee Edith Mkawa told journalists last Tuesday in the capital Lilongwe that the country’s proposal has been refused again.

The proposal focused heavily on tackling transmission of HIV from mother to child by providing lifelong HIV/AIDS treatment to all HIV-positive pregnant women. Malawi had hoped to scale up its ARVs roll-out from 287,000 to 537,000 by the end of the funding year.

Malawi had also planned to scale up voluntary male circumcision to help slow down the HIV infection rate that has stagnated at 12 percent since 2007. Nearly one million men could have been circumcised within the implementation period.

Mkawa said no reasons were given for the rejection of the proposal. “We are yet to receive the reasons as to why the proposal has been turned down by the world body,” she told local journalists. However, to some the rejection hasn’t come as a surprise.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international humanitarian aid organisation better known as Doctors Without Borders, had warned in an article on its website on December 8 that due to budget shortfalls, several African countries “may be disqualified from HIV/AIDS funding in the near future”.

“MSF is seriously concerned that several low-income countries with high HIV-prevalence such as Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho risk being denied funding for HIV and TB in this round,” reads the article in part.

Executive Director of Malawi Health Equity Network, Martha Kwataine, says the news is disappointing. “The impact is quite enormous. About 90 percent of HIV activities in Malawi are donor funded. So this means that there will actually be a halt in the fight against HIV.

As a result we might find our (HIV) statistics plummeting again”, she says. Kwataine says the development should serve as a warning on the part of government to stop over-relying on donor funding.

“We can’t keep on relying on donor funding. And these are our people who need to be on ARVs forever. I have always said that Malawians are not Global Fund people. They belong to the government. The state is responsible for providing health care to its citizens”, she says.

HIV/AIDS has been blamed for 59 percent of deaths among those aged between 15 to 59 years in Malawi, which has a population of 13 million. According to Kwataine the rejection has put the rights of many more Malawians at risk.

“That’s very risky because if people stop taking ARVsfor about two or three months they develop resistance and in the end they die. On the other hand, we have adopted the WHO guideline. Now how are we going to implement the new guidelines? It’s a really a challenge because we will not make any step forward,” she says.

Executive Director for the National Association for People Living with HIV/AIDS in Malawi, Amanda Manjolo, says the denial of funding will have a pernicious effect on the lives of those who are taking ARVs.

“Since the main focus of the proposal was on the procurement of the ARVs, this definitely means that there will be ARV shortages in the near future”, she says.

Concurring with Kwataine, Manjolo says this will affect the government’s plan to take into account the new WHO guidelines that people should start taking ARVs at a CD4 cell count of 350.

Principal Secretary in the Office of the President and cabinet responsible for Nutrition and HIVAIDS programmes, Mary Shawa, plays down the fears.

“Although it is a sad development, the rejection will not have immediate effects because currently we have enough resources to carry us up to 2012. But we take it as a wake up call because we need to continue providing ARVs to those with HIV”, she says.

Shawa says the government is now strategising on how to find non- traditional donors to bankroll its HIV programmes. Like other countries in the SADC region, Malawi has begun treating HIV- positive pregnant women at the WHO-recommended CD4 count of 350, but the standard CD4 count threshold for initiating ARV treatment remains 250.

“We will continue the WHO guidelines. We have enough funding with the money we received from other donors, including the World Bank and DFID”, says Shawa.

According to the Global Fund, only 79 submissions out of about 150 proposals have been awarded this year. Other countries who have been denied funding are Swaziland, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe, like Malawi, has been receiving assistance from the Global Fund since 2002.

Manjolo says with the funding gap, which the Global Fund has created, HIV- positive people in Malawi are likely to suffer severe opportunistic infections and even early death. She is calling for the urgent introduction of a new round of funding to allow rejected applications to be resubmitted.

Excerpt:

By Lameck Masina
BLANTYRE, Oct 20 2010 (IPS)

A draft pension bill has created great concern among workers in Malawi, with some hurriedly seeking early retirement before it will be passed. The bone of contention is a section pegging the retirement age for women at 55 and men at 60.

Labour experts say this age bracket is far too high in a country like Malawi, where the World Health Organisation estimates the average life expectancy at 50 years.

It is the first time that the country will have a law specifying a retirement age. Up until now, companies made their own arrangements with their employees, who pay into a savings fund – which is commonly called ‘pension fund’ – that they can access whenever they need to.

The proposed bill, however, will formalise pension schemes, make them mandatory and allow employees to access the money only after they have reached the specified retirement age.

According to the draft bill, workers may retire before the stipulated age only under special circumstances, such as for medically-certified health problems or permanent emigration from Malawi, for example.

Malawi Congress of Trade Unions (MCTU) president Luther Mambala says that if approved, the bill if approved will mean that most people will never be able to reap the benefits of their labour.

“Making people wait until they are 60 years old to get their pension is cheating people,” he argues.

Mambala believes the draft bill has been modelled on the pension laws of developed countries where life expectancy is high, without taking into consideration the different circumstances in Malawi. He wants the retirement age in the draft bill to be lowered to 40 years for women and 45 years for men.

The union has started to hold awareness raising campaigns about the problems of the draft bill throughout the country, which have propelled workers to call on government to review the bill. MCTU has threatened government with strikes if workers’ concerns are not taken into consideration.

In the meantime, many employees have started to resign from their jobs and collect their share of the ‘pension’ or savings fund, fearing that they will not see any of their money if the bill gets passed in parliament.

Patrick Lunda, a 30-year-old journalist working for Blantyre Newspapers Limited, is one of the employees who decided to tender their resignation because of the proposed bill.

“[Before the draft bill was tabled], I had no intention to resign. But considering my age, I felt there is no reason why I should wait for another 30 years to have my pension,” he explains.

Given Malawi’s low life expectancy, Lunda says he would like to retire earlier than 60 and even fears he might die before reaching the proposed retirement age.

Forty-five-year-old Mercy Muyaya, a secretary at a clothing factory – she preferred not to name her employer – is another who resigned in order to collect her pension before the passing of the bill. She has been paying into the factory’s savings scheme for 20 years.

“I will use my ‘pension’ monies to start my own business. We save this money for a purpose. It wouldn’t be good to collect it when I am frail. I am totally against imposing any age limit,” she says.

The proposed bill has also already had an impact on Malawians’ ability to apply for loans. Before the bill was tabled, employees could use their ‘pension’ fund as security for a loan, but since government announced the draft of the pension bill, banks have changed the rules.

“We are now asking the employer to confirm that that the employee works for that organisation and ask them to send their employees’ salary directly to us so that we can recover the monthly loan repayment,” Anne Magola, corporate affairs manager at the National Bank of Malawi, told the country’s Daily Times newspaper.

Billy Banda, executive director of human rights organisation Malawi Watch, says the proposed bill denies workers their rights.

“How many of us will reach the age of 60? The purpose [should be] that you enjoy your benefits when you are alive and healthy, so that you can use that money, but this bill is defeating the essence of [the concept of] pension,” he says.

He has urged Malawian president Bingu wa Mutharika to speak up, believing he is the only one who can put the issue to rest.

But Malawi’s political elite insists the proposed pension bill will ultimately benefit workers. Labour minister Yunus Mussa says it seeks to safeguard workers after retirement and assist old people to continue enjoying life. He concedes, however, that government is prepared to discuss the concerns MCTU has raised.

Banda believes this is merely lip service to smooth over a tense situation, noting that no compromise will be reached unless president Mutharika intervenes.

“President Mutharika is enjoying absolute power [in Malawi]. Our parliamentarians will pass whatever the president gives his nod to. I am strongly appealing to the state president to ensure that the concerns of the workers are addressed before the bill is presented to parliament,” he urges.

The passing of the pension draft bill will be tabled for parliament’s next sitting in November. Until then, it remains to be seen if the concerns of the country’s workers will impel Mutharika to suggest an amendment.

Excerpt:

By Lameck Masina
BLANTYRE, Dec 14 2009 (IPS)

An experience which Belita Simpokolwe went through in December last year remains deeply etched in her memory. “Sometimes I fail to concentrate in class when these things come back to my mind,” laments 13-year-old Simpokolwe, a grade six pupil at Kawale Primary School, in the northern Malawi district of Chitipa.

Belita Simpokolwe (in striped T-shirt) is only 13 but her stepfather married her off to a 77-year-old man. Credit: Lameck Masina/IPS

But her teacher says it is encouraging that Simpolokwe still performs well in class, and is likely to fulfil her dream of becoming a nurse.

The fourth of five children, Simpokolwe was one of the many victims of kupimbira – a cultural practice in which parents arrange marriages between young girls and older men to get money from a dowry – without the knowledge of the girl.

Sometimes parents offer their girls to men as payment for debt. Kupimbira is an ancient tradition practised by many tribes in northern Malawi.

Belita’s story is a tale of horror. “My stepfather ordered me to quit school and get married to a 77-year-old man because he said I was too old for standard four. I refused, and told him I wanted to continue with my education,” she says.

But her refusal did not change anything.

“Soon after that my stepfather began to send me to the market to collect money from a certain gentleman, ranging from five to 10 dollars, some of which I would use to buy food, then I would give the change my stepfather.”

She says she did not suspect anything untoward in getting the money from the man , as she thought he was a relation of her stepfather’s. But to her surprise, three weeks later the man came to her home with a garden hoe (traditionally, a garden hoe represents dowry in most marital practices in northern Malawi).

“I was very shocked when my stepfather asked me to receive it from the man (a girl receiving the hoe from a man means accepting marriage). Confused, I objected.

“My mother tried to reason with him that I was too young for marriage. But my stepfather charged at my mother, saying he could divorce her if she continued opposing his wish. He also said there was no objection, because we had already ‘eaten the money’ from the gentleman.”

She was forced to accept him, and after two weeks of marriage a group from the Chitipa Women’s Forum came to her rescue. They convinced her parents of the need to send her back to school. Simpokolwe, now living with her biological father, says she is happy to be back at school. The Women’s Forum is a grouping of women in her area who have volunteered to work with an Action Aid-funded project known as Social Empowerment on Rights for Vulnerable and Excluded Women.

The project seeks to end harmful traditional practices that violate the right of women to education.

Chairperson of Chitipa Women’s Forum Ruth Mbale says the group visits the homes of parents and victimised girls, and tell them of the need for the girls to go back to school.

“As women in this area we saw that since most women here did not go further in their education, it was good to discourage early marriages and urge young girls to proceed with education, taking advantage of government’s readmission policy, which allows girls to go back to school,” she says.

Mbale says the major challenge is resistance from parents and sometimes chiefs, who insist that they are too poor to meet the girl’s school needs.

“We don’t really provide assistance to those who go back to school. But under such circumstances we have set up a fund where members make monthly contributions. This enables us to pay school fees for the girls whose parents or guardians fail or refuse to assist,” she says.

Mbale says the girls undergo counselling by members of the forum through regular visits to their homes, where they are asked to forget the past and forge ahead with education.

Statistics from an impact-assessment report show that the project has so far taken back to school 40 girls aged between seven and 16, married through kupimbira in the district.

Mbale says the efforts have paid dividends, as some chiefs have realised the need to do away with the practice, which she says not only hinders girls from continuing with education, but also promotes HIV transmission.

Senior Chief Mwaulambia says he is trying to end the practice in his area, although there are still some families secretly continuing.

“Indeed we accept that kupimbira is a bad practice, especially when we are told to treat both girl and boy child alike. In my area I make sure it is being suppressed very vividly. If someone is forcing a child into kupimbira, we as chiefs have our own traditional ways of punishing our people. We may tell him to pay a chicken. If he objects, we have powers to evict him from the village,” he says.

Other traditional practices believed to violate the rights of women include ‘nhlazi’, giving into marriage a young relative of the wife, as a reward to her husband for being good to her family; ‘kulowa kufa’, sexual intercouse between a newly widowed woman and a designated man to ‘cleanse the village of death’, and ‘fisi’, hiring a man to engage in sex for the purpose of having children, especially when the husband is impotent.

The project is also being implemented in three other districts – Rumphi, Salima and Chiradzulu.

Meanwhile the Malawi government, in collaboration with civil society organisations, is implementing programmes to curtail harmful cultural practices that violate the rights of women.

For example, Forum for African Women Educationists in Malawi is championing the government’s school readmission policy, which seeks to return all teen mothers to school. Its national co-ordinator, Esther Msowoya, says the organisation in October alone rescued 10 girls from forced marriages in the northern district of Rumphi.

Nsowoya has hailed traditional leaders in the district for their help in the fight against the malpractice.

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