{"id":7052,"date":"2012-02-07T08:42:44","date_gmt":"2012-02-07T08:42:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.faceofmalawi.com\/?p=7052"},"modified":"2012-02-07T08:42:44","modified_gmt":"2012-02-07T08:42:44","slug":"bingu-grills-civil-society-and-imf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/2012\/02\/07\/bingu-grills-civil-society-and-imf\/","title":{"rendered":"BINGU GRILLS CIVIL SOCIETY AND IMF"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.faceofmalawi.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Bingu-1-300x200.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.faceofmalawi.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Bingu-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Bingu-1-300x200\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-7115\" \/><\/a>There was more glamour and glitz on Friday, February 3, 2012, when president Bingu officially opened the 43rd session of parliament at the Parliament Building in Lilongwe.<\/p>\n<p>After the pomp and glamour, the president made his State of the Nation address to the August House. He started with a call for patriotism to resolve the challenges facing the country.<\/p>\n<p>Which to many, was a rare acknowledgement by the president of the problems facing Malawi; namely elongated forex and fuel shortage.<\/p>\n<p>But people\u2019s expectations were short lived when Mutharika launched another attack at the civil society and other International donors, blaming them of exaggerating and aggravating the problems in the country.<\/p>\n<p>The president further blamed the opposition, civil society and some international donors, whom he dubbed \u201cexternal forces\u201d, for detracting his government\u2019s development endeavours.<\/p>\n<p>He further asked IMF and Western donor countries to give him 3 years to find lasting solutions to the problems facing Malawi.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPrevious devaluation has affected local people and made them even poorer. Devaluation is not the only way to solve economic problems. It is just one of them.\u201d Said the president.<\/p>\n<p>He also defended the Zero deficit policy as having being very successful so far.<\/p>\n<p>The president also grilled the civil society for giving him deadlines to address issues.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is not normal. This is unacceptable.\u201d Quoting a number of constitutional provisions he emphasised that the power and mandate to govern the country lies in the three arms of the government; executive, legislature and judiciary. \u201dNot civil society.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He then went on to say,\u201d Malawi is a success story and not a failed state as other unpatriotic individuals make it look\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>But opposition leader John Tembo and other quarters feel the president has missed an opportunity to articulate solutions to deal with the problems Malawi is facing at the moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There was more glamour and glitz on Friday, February 3, 2012, when president Bingu officially opened the 43rd session of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7115,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[525,1516,258],"class_list":["post-7052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national-news","tag-bingu","tag-cso","tag-malawi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7052","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=7052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7052\/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=7052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}