Kamuzu Chibambo labels  Malawi donor dependency ‘chicken mentality’

Opposition Peoples Transformation Party (Petra) president, Kamuzu Chibambo has branded the country’s lust for donor aid as a ‘chicken mentality’, and  has since urged the nation to fully utilize locally available resources if the economy is to transform.

The local economy continues to sail through troubled waters, and the authorities have started embracing the idea that bilateral donors are not bringing back their budgetary support.

Bilateral donors- who contributed about 40 percent of the country’s budget- closed their aid taps for Malawi in November 2013 following revelations of massive looting of public funds by greedy civil servants and businesses in what is known as the cashgate.

And in a recorded interview with Capital Radio, Chibambo said it was high time Malawians started making better use of locally available resources and stop relying on aid.

“Donor aid is not the answer for Malawi, and this is the message that should be drummed into our people again and again. For me donor aid I take it as a chicken mentality, wanting others to bankroll our living in Malawi. It cannot be; it’s unacceptable,” said Chibambo.

Chibambo said the country has been blessed with resources such as water, minerals and land which, if put into better use, would help to transform the social and economic landscape.

“We need to look at what we have as a country; let’s take full stock of what we have. We need to ask ourselves what are we creating for our country.”

Malawi has been depending on donor aid for decades, however, last year Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe advised the nation to forget the possibility of donors returning with their aid purse, saying the donors were pulling out of a number of countries.

“I would like to emphasize this very strongly. We should not proceed on the premise that the donors will come back with their budgetary support purses. We could have budgetary support from the World Bank, the EU and the African Development Bank but I would have difficulty in proceeding on the basis of expecting that the bilateral donors will come back,” said Gondwe.

He further said expecting donors to come back was not a realistic expectation.

Gondwe noted that mobilizing more resources locally and being efficient by doing more with less were some of the options on the table for the country to operate without donor dependency.

Recently, a University of Malawi’s Chancellor College- based political analyst Dr Boniface Dulani faulted and attributed President Peter Mutharika’s failure to win back budgetary support to his inconsistent position on the issue of donor aid.

Dulani also told Malawi’s flagship daily, The Nation’s Political Index that the country’s economic policies continue to make the nation unattractive investment destination with Malawians heavily squeezed with punitive taxes making domestic savings and investment impossible.

Mutharika has been inconsistent on donor aid. He has been pleading with the donors to reopen the aid taps despite his earlier claims that Malawi does not need aid.