{"id":3690,"date":"2011-07-18T23:10:01","date_gmt":"2011-07-18T23:10:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.faceofmalawi.com\/?p=3690"},"modified":"2011-07-18T23:10:01","modified_gmt":"2011-07-18T23:10:01","slug":"malawi-will-not-apologise-for-expelling-britains-top-diplomat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/2011\/07\/18\/malawi-will-not-apologise-for-expelling-britains-top-diplomat\/","title":{"rendered":"Malawi will not apologise for expelling Britain\u2019s top diplomat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.faceofmalawi.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/malawi_bingu0021-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"malawi_bingu002\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-3691\" \/> Malawi will not apologise for expelling Britain\u2019s top diplomat, President Bingu wa Mutharika said Monday, insisting the former colonial power\u2019s aid suspension will not create a budget gap.<br \/>\n\u201cIt\u2019s certainly not a possibility. What do we apologise for? Here is an envoy who insulted our country,\u201d Mutharika told AFP in an interview.<br \/>\n\u201cThat must be made very clear \u2013 we are not demanding an apology from Britain, neither should Britain demand an apology from us. You cannot be insulted and then apologise at the same time because we never insulted Britain.\u201d<br \/>\nBritain last week suspended budgetary aid over Malawi\u2019s failure to address concerns over economic management and governance in the latest worsening of ties since a diplomatic spat in April.<br \/>\nBut Mutharika insisted that Malawi had not been singled out by London, despite the comments by Britain\u2019s Department for International Development.<br \/>\n\u201cThere seems to be a misunderstanding because Britain has apparently reduced 43% of their budgetary support globally. We happen to be one of the countries where they have decided not to give us budgetary support so it\u2019s not targeted against Malawi,\u201d he said.<br \/>\n\u201cAs a matter of fact, we are already having dialogue to resume our normal relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>While Britain\u2019s government is implementing a wide range of spending cuts, it has insisted that it will not reduce its overseas aid budget.<br \/>\nTies between the two countries were strained in April when the British ambassador was expelled after a leaked diplomatic cable accused Mutharika of \u201cbecoming ever more autocratic and intolerant of criticism\u201d.<br \/>\nLondon in turn expelled Malawi\u2019s envoy to Britain.<br \/>\n\u201cMalawi never broke its relations with Britain. It\u2019s just that somehow the representation of Britain here in Malawi didn\u2019t act in accordance with diplomatic practices and we said remove him and bring another one, that\u2019s all we asked,\u201d said Mutharika.<br \/>\nMutharika said the cutting of budgetary aid would not affect the country\u2019s \u201czero-deficit budget\u201d in which recurrent expenses like government salaries will be paid out of local resources.<br \/>\n\u201cWe have set our budget this year of \u20ac1.4bn and we are going to raise \u20ac1.4bn from our resources so there is no funding gap whatsoever,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Malawi will not apologise for expelling Britain\u2019s top diplomat, President Bingu wa Mutharika said Monday, insisting the former colonial power\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[258,337],"class_list":["post-3690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national-news","tag-malawi","tag-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}