Reading Time: 3 minutes Several years ago I featured a man I met in the Nsaru area in Lilongwe Rural, Mr. Msampha Mwale, who at that time was 72 years old but going to school. The time I met him, he was about to write his JC examinations. Our conversation, which was mostly in English, revealed to me the […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes What set England and eventually the entire British Isles apart from the rest of the countries in the world, turning them into a world power is the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Several British entrepreneurs invested in new and innovative ways of making goods. The textile industry was one

Reading Time: 3 minutes The 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 minutes There 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 minutes Recently 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 minutes When 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 minutes In 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 minutes The 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 minutes Production 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 minutes While 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