Shame on regulator Macra
Malawi Commutations Regulatory Authority (Macra) must be living in a world of its own characterised with financial opulence and indifference to austerity. The country is struggling with serious foreign currency shortages, yet Macra has the audacity to announce its plan to spend a whopping $1.5 million on a mysterious machine purportedly designed to clamp down on freedom of expression.
Macra claim they want to end misinformation and disinformation. What this grand scheme amounts to is the sinister motive to curtail fundamental freedoms and stifle democratic spaces. This is not the first time. Macra is renowned for hatching sinister moves, especially when a crucial election is a few months away.
There was a time Macra made plans to procure a ‘spy machine’ under suspicious justification to monitor the operations of mobile phone service providers. The spy machine was to cost Malawians millions of dollars too.
Now here is Macra’s madness. Malawi government is operating with a serious forex crisis, forcing government to borrow billions of kwacha to support its import bills. The unending fuel shortages are a closest manifestation of this crisis as Government is struggling to raise dollars for importing fuel. The past weeks has seen Malawians enduring a burgeoning black-market of fuel selling the liquid at an illegal K10 000 per litre.
Macra is so insensitive to the plight and suffering of Malawians, especially at this lean season when the demand for forex is at the peak. Malawi is experiencing a food crisis as well. This requires millions of dollars to import maize. Over 5.7 million Malawians are faced with hunger, and the price of maize is rising at a supersonic speed. A bag of maize weighing 50 kilogrammes is selling at over K60 000 in many markets, and it has hit an all-time high of K75 000 in other parts of the country.
The trend is similarly worrisome for fertiliser prices. Large amounts of forex are required to import fertilisers, and clearly the government has to look for borrowers who can provide the dollars to buy the fertilisers. Strangely, here is Macra which is ready to splash a cool $1.5 million to some Ghanaian firm to supply us a machine that will be spying over our WhatsApp messages and other social media chats. It is sheer insanity of the highest order that must be condemned with the strongest terms.
Malawi’s budget is also struggling as expenditures are skyrocketing while revenue sources are dwindling. The budget deficits are widening as economists project that by end of 2025, the deficit will widen further by 9.9 percent. Government will have to continue to borrow domestically or from foreign sources to meet the budget gap.
Sadly, this will happen at a time when Malawi’s public debt is already alarmingly high as it is unsustainable. Last year, total public debt was over K15 trillion, and the government must put aside K1.4 trillion for debt repayments. Clearly, it will take us many years to finish the debt repayments, as the government’s appetite for borrowing is unstoppable.
The worrying thing about the high debt burden is that much of the borrowing is done to fund non-priority expenditures. These include local and foreign travels for President Chakwera and Vice-President Michael Usi. The gospel about austerity measures is preached and, promises for fiscal discipline are broken by the same top political leadership.
As Malawi is eight months away to the elections, stranger expenditures that are politically motivated will likely be observed. This includes the unjustified procurement by Macra for this unnecessary machine. The machine will not only drain our scarce forex. It will also reverse our democratic rights. Macra uses public funds, and this project is not in public interest. Macra must stop wasteful procurement immediately.