Reading Time: 3 minutesThe story is told of two Brazilian ladies who travelled on highway in a Volkswagen Beetle and had a breakdown in the middle of nowhere. They parked, got out of the car and rushed to the front to open what they thought was the bonnet. They had the shock of their life when they discovered […]

Reading Time: 3 minutesThere are several ways of beating the current hike in fuel prices. One of such ways is to switch to a different, cheaper, type of fuel. Some vehicles are purpose made to run on gas – liquid petroleum gas (lpg) or compressed natural gas (cng). Even those that are not manufactured to run on gas

Reading Time: 3 minutesRecently there have been suggestions to the effect that Malawi should go into barter arrangements to procure fuel, in light of the forex challenges the country is facing. Presumably quantities of agricultural or mineral products will be assembled with aim of finding an oil exporter who would be willing to get them in exchange for

Reading Time: 3 minutesWhen I worked for Blantyre Print and Packaging in the 1980s, Lever Brothers (now Unilever) was our major client. We used to supply surf and vim cartons, Lifebouy and Sunlight wrappers and a whole host of other wrappers to their busy factory in Limbe. Besides soap products, Lever Brothers used to manufacture cooking oils (Covo

Reading Time: 3 minutesIn one of my recent articles, I stated that between a radio program discussing politics and another discussing production, the former would be inundated with callers while the latter would hardly have a caller. This would be so because what passes as a discussion of politics in Malawi is basically a discussion of people. The

Reading Time: 3 minutesThe world is moving in the direction of electric vehicles which will replace those that run on fossil fuel. Fossil fuels are an environmental hazard because they are from organic matter that lived millions of years ago and has over the ages, through heat and compression, been converted to the form in which it is

Reading Time: 3 minutesProduction appears to be an alien undertaking in Malawi, and yet we need it for our economy to tick. Yes, we must reduce imports as explained in my last article but we must at the same time embrace secondary production so that we enhance our capacity to generate forex. At the very least, production will

Reading Time: 3 minutesWhile we have upwards of 18 million consumers in Malawi, you can count Malawian producers on your fingers, with some fingers left over. By production is meant value addition here. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that we have a consumers’ association but not a producers’ association, as I pointed out in my last article. It

Reading Time: 3 minutesA clip showing late Professor Chikaonda being interviewed by a TV presenter was in circulation on social media last week. The gist of the message in that clip is that as African countries were becoming independent of their former colonial rulers, Britain expressed the concern that some of them, particularly Nyasaland and Mauritius, would not

Reading Time: 3 minutesA clip showing a foreign university presenting the Malawi economic case circulated on social media last week. Some of what was presented probably bordered on exaggeration. It was stated, for example, that Malawi was a walking nation where people everywhere seemed to be walking to no particular destination. Everything seemed to proceed at a walking