Official sponsors of the Malawi National Netball Team, FDH Bank, have travelled to Capetown in South Africa to offer their support to the girls as they kick start their Netball World Cup finals tonight.
The Queens will open their group B with Scotland in the first Netball World Cup in Africa.
FDH Bank Public Relations Manager Lorraine Chikhula said they felt the need to follow the Queens and give them support to power them up for the competition.
“As a sponsor, we are very excited about the start of the Netball World Cup and The Queens’ participation. We are in Capetown offering them full support, and we wish them all the best as the games start. Our expectations are very high, and we believe The Queens will give a world-class performance and bring back the cup,” she said.
The Malawi Queens interim coach Samuel Kanyenda commended FDH Bank and all Malawians for the support, saying they feel charged up and ready to burn Scotland.
“The good thing is that we prepared well for the competition. We know we are not facing Scotland alone, but we just want to make sure that we start on a high note with a win against Scotland. They are not a new side, and we know them,” he said.
The Queens, ranked sixth in the world, will face third-ranked England on Saturday before playing Barbados on Sunday.
Tonight, Australia will play Zimbabwe, while South Africa battles out with Wales, and Uganda is facing Singapore.
On 21 April, 2021, President Lazarus McCaryhy Chakwera left Lilongwe for Maputo for the Southern Africa Development Community (Sadc) Extraordinary Double Troika Summit which was organized to seek a lasting solution to the Islamic insurgency in Mozambique.
After the meeting Malawi President Dr. Chakwera and his Mozambican counterpart Filipe Nyusi agreed to strengthen their cooperation with a special focus on trade, security, transport, energy, and diplomacy.
The agreement heralds a new dawn for Malawi and Mozambique, which have been at a spat over decades.
Nyusi and Chakwera
The spat got worse during the time of late President Bingu Wa Mutharika when Malawi was trying to find a direct route to the Indian Ocean through the Shire-Zambezi Waterway Project.
Since Chakwera visit to Mozambique, Malawi has enjoyed direct and indirect benefits.
One of the such many benefits is that Maputo has granted land at Nacala Port for Lilongwe to build its own infrastructure to handle cargo.
“This is very true. President Felipe Nyusi granted a plot to His Excellency Lazarus Chakwera in Nacala in which Malawi should develop facilities for processing of liquid and dry cargo,” confirmed Alfonso Chikuni, Malawi’s Secretary for Energy.
“We are visiting the plot tomorrow [today],” he added in an interview yesterday.
It is a diplomatic groundbreaking development that not only strengthens the two countries’ bilateral ties, but could also help Malawi cut transport costs and reduce prices of goods, including fuel, fertilisers and other imports.
The development could also boost Chakwera’s strong standing on foreign policy for pulling off a feat that five of his predecessors failed, including the late Bingu wa Mutharika whose Nsanje Inland Port dream turned into a nightmare after diplomatic missteps with Maputo.
“This has not happened by accident. It has happened because relations between Malawi and Mozambique have improved tremendously over the last three years,” said Malawi High Commissioner to Mozambique Wezi Moyo in an interview this week.
She added: “From the word go, President Chakwera was very intentional about improving relations with Maputo, so he put a lot of attention on Mozambique.
“He has travelled to this country more than any other Malawian President. Those efforts have now started bearing fruits for us Malawians.”
On the Nacala land, Lilongwe plans to build a version of Malawi Cargo Centre (MCC) in Tanzania.
Under the Malawi-Tanzania Corridor Transport System Agreement, Malawi was granted land to lease in Dar es Salaam and Mbeya where an inland port and port handling facilities were constructed and installed to facilitate movement of goods destined to or originating from Malawi.
The facilities are designed to handle both dry and wet cargo and include rail sidings, rolling stock, locomotives, warehouses, cargo handling equipment, fuel farms, fuel pipelines and housing, among others.
The facilities operate as independent units and are collectively known as Malawi Cargo Centres.
Malawi Cargo Centres Limited (MCCL) was established to manage, promote and market the assets and facilities of the MCCs. They operate as dry ports where they are a one-stop shop for the clearance and consolidation of goods. Within the premises of the MCCs are customs officials while MCCL acts as clearing and forwarding agent.
Government will have to decide on the Nacala facility’s operating model, whether to go for a public-private sector partnership or set up a fully-fledged State enterprise to optimise the direct port-rail link that Nacala provides to Blantyre and later to Lilongwe through Liwonde.
National Oil Company of Malawi (Nocma) director of operations Micklas Reuben said in an interview that the parastatal will take the lead in moving goods, fuel in its case, from Nacala via rail, having already identified Geneva-based Augusto Energy to lift 83 000 tonnes (196 million litres) of fuel through Nacala.
As a starting point, he said Nocma is currently processing 2.5 million litres in roughly 56 wagons from Nacala to its depots at Matindi in Blantyre.
“Since our rail can support 16 wagons, it means that we can offload the 56 wagons carrying 2.5 million litres within a week,” Reuben said, emphasising the efficiency of the Nacala route.
Filomene Bene, a senior executive at the Mozambique company CFM that runs railways and ports, urged Malawi to diversify port usage to Nacala because unlike Beira, which they also manage, Nacala is not very busy.
In addition, she said, Nacala’s harbour is so deep that it does not require the constant dredging that Beira, the current port of choice for the Malawi market, needs.
To enhance global collaborative efforts in education and outreach of scientific results and implication for regional hazards due to continental rifting in the southern East of Africa, Ministry of Mining together with other international universities have organized a workshop in Blantyre. 56 Earth Scientists from 14 countries and 4 continents are discussing and debating mechanisms of continental breakup in East Africa
The four day workshop taking place in Blantyre commenced on 25th July and will finish on Friday the 28th. The workshop is aimed at strengthening interdisciplinary and international collaborations to facilitate the formation of new collaborations, particularly for early-career scientists mostly students in geosciences.
Through the workshop which is called Southern East Rift System (EARS), Malawi Geological Survey Department under Mining ministry, University of California, Darvis and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will synthesize recent scientific results on continental rifting in the (EARS)and discuss future projects and foster new collaborations.
Speaking in an interview, Deputy Director for Geological Survey Department in the Ministry of Mining Kondwani Dombola said it is high time communities understand the concept and map a comprehensive future towards changes in the environments.
“Over the past 10 years, a number of new scientific studies focused on the weakly extended and magma-poor southern part of the EARS have emerged a provision of new and surprising insights into the onset of continental breakup” Said Dombola. He went further to say scientists from Africa, United States and elsewhere will share and synthesize the results of these recent studies to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of continental stretching and associated hazards in the southern part of the East African Rift System”
Representing the international participants, Lecturer from Northern Arizona University (NAU),Donna Shillington commended the organizers for the workshop citing the interactions and attendance as positive in bringing awareness to general public.
“I am happy to see a large number of the participants in the workshop, this is a good and it is so courageous ,we have met a lot of people from African countries and others outside Africa ,this has given us hope for a collaborative positive outcome” highlighted Professor Shillington.
According to the results of various studies in regions, Malawi Rift System is located towards the ends of the magma poor in the western branch of East Africa Rift System (EARS), hence contributions from scientists working on other parts of the EARS and other rifts globally, also counts our mother land.
Professor Donna Shillington-Lecturer Northern Arizona university (NAU)
NBS Bank Plc and Malawi Prison Service (MPS) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that will see officers from the service accessing various services from the Bank conveniently.
Speaking on the MOU signing whose ceremony was held at Prison Offices in Zomba on Monday, NBS Bank Acting Cluster Manager Southern and Eastern Region Andrew Kambalame said the partnership is aimed at easing processes for the officers to access NBS Bank loans.
“It is about us offering loans with flexible terms to members of Malawi Prison Service where they will access better services with tailored solutions for them. The agreement will ease the process to access the loans, from application to the release of the funds to ensure they are spending less time for their financial transactions.”
“We are also offering financial literacy services to them. So, the officers will have an opportunity to have a financial advisory on what they can do with the finances or how best they can utilize their finances with NBS Bank,” said Kambalame.
He further indicated that the officers would be able to access the ‘Easy Civil Account’ which is for civil servants, Smart Finance which offers the officers a chance to access goods and services such as iron sheets, building materials, electronics, among others from particular companies that are in partnership with NBS Bank.
MPS Commissioner General, Masauko Wiscot commended NBS Bank for formalizing the partnership which he said has existed for a long time.
“We have been in partnership for a long time only that it was not formalized. NBS Bank has given out loans to our officers, but we missed this link where the partnership was supposed to be formalized.”
“This is a very significant step because our officers used to struggle to access Bank loans, but looking at the spectrum of services that NBS Bank is offering our officers, it will also offer them a chance to plan for their retirement. We have had problems with our officers retiring without proper homes.,” explained Wiscot.
The officers will also be able to access vehicle financing as well as mortgages from the Bank, according to the MoU.
The Malawi’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) has announced adjusting upwards the policy rate by two percentage points from 22 percent to 24 percent.
A policy rate is the rate at which commercial banks borrow from the central bank as lender of last resort.
However, as a key driver of interest rates on loans, the decision will have ripple effects as commercial banks will likely implement reciprocal adjustments to the price of loans.
Reserve Bank
In a statement published on Friday, RBM Governor Wilson Banda said the Third Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) Meeting revised upwards the policy rate by 200 basis points as price pressures have intensified, such that inflation is projected to remain substantially above the medium-term target for longer.
Practically, the decisions mean that the RBM is trying to reduce money supply in the economy by increasing the cost of borrowing.
This comes at a time authorities are battling a high inflation rate recorded at 27.3 percent as of June, according to National Statistical Office (NSO).
