Blantyre City Council withholds permission to Cdedi demo: Namiwa blasts  ‘draconian tactics’ to deny citizens’ rights

The Centre for Democracy and Economic Development Initiatives (CDEDI) and the Blantyre Small Scale Business Operators have filed a fresh application for permission to the Blantyre City Council to hold peaceful demonstration on January 13 2021.

Cdedi and the business operators had initially planned to hold the protests on January 8 2021.

But according to CDEDI executive director Sylvester Namiwa, the city authorities used some “archaic and draconian tactics” to deny the citizens their constitutional right to peaceful demonstrations by sitting on the letter up to date.

Namiwa, in a statement issued on Friday morning, discloses that they were informed verbally by the personal secretary for Blantyre City Council chief executive officer on January 6 2021, that the CEO had travelled to Lilongwe on official duties, and that there was still no official acknowledgement of  the organisation’s notice of the peaceful demonstrations.

“This to us was a very flimsy excuse because we didn’t believe that the CEO’s absence meant that business had to come to a halt at the city council. We tried in vain to contact the CEO, but all his mobile phones were out of reach. We do not want to believe that this was just a sheer coincidence,” Namisa said in the statement.

He says it against this background that Cdedi and the Blantyre Small Scale Business Operators have once again written the council to make a fresh notice to hold peaceful demonstrations on Wednesday 13th January 2021 starting from 9:00 hours.

Cdedi and the Lilongwe Small Scale Business Operators (LSSBO)  recently organised  first major peaceful demonstration against the Tonse Alliance government in Lilongwe with hundreds of protestors demanding  leadership to respond to governance queries.

In their petition,  Cdedi had 12 highlighted queries, which include irrational arrests, selective justice and the fact that illegal foreign nationals are taking over even businesses which struggling Malawians are supposed to be doing exclusively.