Former speaker Gotani Hara says sustainable productivity only solution in turning around the Malawi economy

Former Speaker of the National Assembly Right Honourable Gotani Hara on Monday turned the August House into a lecture room. Hara used her time well contributing towards the Presidential national address delivered few weeks ago by President Professor Arther Peter Mutharika.

Hara started by congratulating the speaker of national Assembly Sameer Suleiman for ascending on the hot seat describing Suleiman as a prophet who prophesided about his appointment.

She then went straight to tip Government on how to turn around the economy of this country.

PRODUCTIVITY THE WAY TO GO

The former speaker said it is sad that as a country $3.3Billion is spent towards importation of goods while at the same time we earn only $970Million through exports.

“I just wanted to give you few statistics about our country as we are standing we are using $3.3 billion for importing goods into this country,whilst we are only exporting $970 million worth of goods. That’s what we need to seriously be discussing, what should we do to cover that gap,” she said.

Hara said, the country out there is waiting for solutions from the members of parliament and that slowly the country is losing patience and confidence because what they want is solution.

Hara said that she still feel people belive Members of the house are not performing because they are not bringing solution to close the gap existing between imports and exports.

“They still feel we are not performing because we have not covered this very important gap honorable members. We need to go back in terms of what we need to do. For me, I feel production, production and production is what we need,” she said.

TRANSFORMING AGRICULTURE THROUGH REVAMPING EXTENSION SERVICES

Here the Right honorable former speaker, took time to elaborate. She started by welcoming the new Minister of Agriculture and hoped that she will going to help in terms of increasing productivity.

She said Malawi do have farm extension workers in the various areas but most of them are not being productive as much as the president is putting in all this effort.

“The support system itself needs to be improved. The vehicle that we are riding as a country needs transformation. The civil service that we have needs transformation,” she said.

She said while the country want increase in the fertilizer use, there is more to it than just the fertilizer saying the country need extension service workers to actually have a better skills of how they can support the farmers in the villages, because the country want to produce more per hectare.

“As we are talking if we go to tobacco, you find that the farmers themselves are only producing 980 kilograms a hectare, when colleagues in Zimbabwe are producing 1000 to 1500 kilograms per hectare of tobacco,” She said.

“What we need, Honorable Minister, is for us to actually improve in terms of productivity for the tobacco productivity so that we do get more foreign exchange from the exports than what we get from this,”

ON CONSTITUENCY DEVELOPMENT FUND (CDF)

On constituency Development Fund, Honorable Gotani Hara commended such magnitude increase of the funds currently at K5billion.

She said: “Mr speaker Sir , the people of my constituency are very happy with the announcement from the president that he is going to provide 5 billion kwacha for constituency Development Fund. This is a big game changer, and congratulations to the President for that as a member of parliament, I do know that that money is going to help me do schools,”

Gotani Hara said the CDF will going to help grade the roads as well as building dams for doing fisheries. Gotani said she will be able to buy a driller so that she do not ask the Minister of water to drill boreholes for her.

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