Chakwera chides ignorance, poor academic foundation
President Lazarus Chakwera yesterday said there is a price Malawi pays for ignorance and blamed it on poor education system.
The President said this in Blantyre yesterday when he opened a £10 million (about K23 billion) worth Clinical Research Excellence and Training Open Resource Centre constructed in Blantyre by the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Research Programme (MLW).
He said to become a self-reliant industrialised upper-middle-income—which is the goal of the national vision dubbed Malawi 2063—the country must invest in scientific research, saying without strong research institutions a nation is run on “ignorance and guess work.”
“That is the price we are paying as a nation for treating ignorance with kid gloves for decades. You see, when you stay in a state of ignorance, people come and take advantage of you by selling you fake things because they know you won’t know the difference,” he said.
Chakwera added he has spent the past four years of his five-year term working on solutions to problems that were caused by wrong solutions that should never have been permitted.
According to him, government is spending money on fixing roads instead of building new ones .
“And to make matters worse, every time I have started to fix something that has been done wrongly from the beginning, someone goes to court to get an injunction or threatens to organise vigils and demonstrations.
“But no one can scare me because whether anyone likes it or not, the madness of allowing things that are wrong needs to stop, and I am here to stop it,” he said.
Julia Gillard, chairperson of board of governors of Wellcome Trust, which funded the project, said the new centre has come through long time partnerships to bring health challenges’ solutions in Malawi and abroad.
On his part, Clinical Research Excellence and Training Open Resource lead Stephen Gordon said the centre was the beginning of a new chapter for Malawi science.
Among others, the five-storey building has a digital library, health research innovation hub and state of the art laboratory
