Africa-Press – Malawi. Consumer Association of Malawi (CAMA) has asked President Lazarus Chakwera to take up his responsibilities and come up with lasting solutions to the current state of Malawi’s economy.
In a statement yesterday, Executive Director for CAMA John Kapito said that Malawians are looking up to Chakwera to turn around the economy because it his job to assemble the right minds to come up with solutions.
Kapito noted that the economy is now in a much worse state than before because of the issue of devaluation and there are no indications that the President and his Finance Minister have any plans to cushion the poor considering the government’s “poor decision and judgement on the impacts of the devaluation that could have been avoided”.
He noted that devaluation of Kwacha was claimed to be unnecessary evil by the President and his Finance Minister but Malawians were also told that it was to realign the Kwacha with other major currencies and that negotiations with the IMF were at an advanced stage and that soon the economy would start receiving the much needed forex .
“Unfortunately, the outcome of that decision has been negative and after four months since the devaluation of the kwacha, we have seen continued depreciation of the Kwacha and the support from the IMF is nowhere and the Economy continues to sink with sharp price increases on all basic commodities.
“We have noted closures of both SME’s and other Industries creating mass retrenchments in an economy that has the highest unemployment rates amid scarcity of Forex, Petrol and Diesel,” he explained.
He went on to say that people want to know if the devaluation is a necessary evil or poor miscalculation of IMF’s support and response and if the devaluation meant to increase exports despite the president knowing fully that Malawi has no export capacity.
He said: “Was the devaluation of the kwacha meant to hurt Consumers with high cost of living? What exactly was the unnecessary evil hidden in the devaluation of the kwacha to necessitate the current economic challenges?”
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