President Lazarus Chakwera says the Covid-19 pandemic has cost the country 600 000 jobs since the first cases were reported in April 2020.
In a Hardtalk interview with British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired yesterday, the President said the development automatically reversed the gains his Tonse Alliance administration made towards creating the promised one million jobs within the first 12 months in office.
But he said despite the country losing such a number of jobs, his administration has aggressively cushioned the situation through a number of initiatives, including the Affordable Inputs Programme (AIP).
Said Chakwera: “With other people being laid off since industries were scaling down due to the pandemic, 600 000 people lost their jobs while 300 000 were able to be employed… That was not possible [creating one million jobs] in an ideal situation.”
The President said it was, therefore, important for Malawians and all critics to understand the context in which the economy is operating due to the pandemic.
Put to him that his predecessor Peter Mutharika is on record as having said that the nine political-party Tonse Alliance government is creating one million poor people instead of creating one million jobs, Chakwera responded: “He [Mutharika] should be the best and the first one to know what they did by destroying the economy of that country thinking it can be resuscitated in one year.
“You cannot take him [Mutharika] seriously because he is not telling one iota of truth.”
He said when they started implementing the maiden AIP, his administration created thousands of jobs, such that young people were employed across the country while about 3.7 million smallholder farmers had accessed affordable inputs.
Chakwera said due to AIP—which cost taxpayers K142 billion in its first year of implementation—Malawi now has on record the best maize yield.
He also said the majority of Malawians who are smallholder farmers voted Tonse government on the basis that it would offer them affordable inputs “which we did provide”.
The President stated that his government has created income generating work for thousands of rural Malawians, adding that the National Economic Empowerment Fund, formerly Malawi Enterprise Development Fund, has also established thousands of new businesses through the disbursement of billions of kwacha in loans.
In an interview yesterday, Employers Consultative Association of Malawi executive director George Khaki agreed with Chakwera that the economy had lost over 600 000 jobs by March this year due to the pandemic.
He said: “We do agree with the figure and actually the figure which he is mentioning is based on our study that we conducted and the study showed that the economy would lose about 680 000 jobs by March 2021 on assumption that Covid-19 would persist.
“But we see that the pandemic is still raging on and as such that number will likely increase.”
The Malawi economy is estimated to have grown by a paltry 0.9 percent last year due to the negative impact of Covid-19. To meaningfully impact on poverty alleviation efforts, Malawi is expected to grow at six percent.
In May this year, Minister of Finance Felix Mlusu upped Malawi’s economic growth forecast for 2021 to 3.8 percent from 3.5 percent projected in February 2021.
The minister also projected that economic growth for Malawi was projected at 5.4 percent in 2022.
Delivering his 2021/22 National Budget Statement, Mlusu banked that growth would be driven by declining Covid-19 cases and better-than-expected rainfall.
But two months down the line, Covid-19 cases have taken a sharp turn and continue to increase exponentially, prompting economic analysts to express scepticism over the optimistic growth painted earlier by Mlusu.
