{"id":8632,"date":"2012-04-10T20:28:45","date_gmt":"2012-04-10T20:28:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.faceofmalawi.com\/?p=8632"},"modified":"2012-04-10T20:28:45","modified_gmt":"2012-04-10T20:28:45","slug":"joyce-banda-unveils-her-cleanup-plans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/2012\/04\/10\/joyce-banda-unveils-her-cleanup-plans\/","title":{"rendered":"Joyce Banda unveils her cleanup plans"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Malawi’s new President Joyce Banda on Tuesday unveiled a shake-up of top officials charged with government finances and media, purging loyalists of the late leader Bingu wa Mutharika.<\/p>\n

“Although we are in mourning, certain decisions cannot wait,” Banda told a news conference in the capital Lilongwe, three days after taking office.<\/p>\n

She also announced an investigation into the mysterious murder of student activist Robert Chasowa. Mutharika’s critics have accused police of staging a hit against Chasowa, implicating former police chief Peter Mukhito, who was sacked on Monday.<\/p>\n

“As a mother, I feel for my fellow mother who doesn’t know what killed her son. I understand how painful it is, and I will make sure we find out who killed our son Chasowa,” Banda said.<\/p>\n

“We don’t want people to go about murdering people fearlessly.”<\/p>\n

Top among Banda’s new appointments was Mary Nkosi as Reserve Bank governor, making her the first woman to hold the job.<\/p>\n

A long-time deputy governor, she replaces Perks Ligoya, a close ally of Mutharika who pursued a rigid exchange rate policy that the International Monetary Fund has blamed for much of Malawi’s economic woes.<\/p>\n

She named a new secretary to the Treasury, appointing career bureaucrat Radson Mwadiwa, who also becomes chairperson of the state-owned Malawi Savings Bank.<\/p>\n

Banda sacked Patricia Kaliati, the information minister who publicly insisted that Mutharika was alive more than one day after his death on Thursday.<\/p>\n

The new minister is Moses Kunkuyu, a parliamentarian who broke away from Mutharika’s Democratic Progressive Party to press for reforms.<\/div>\n

She also sacked the head of the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation, Bright Malopa, another Mutharika ally who used state media to campaign against Banda after her expulsion from the DPP.<\/p>\n

The new director general is Benson Tembo, a veteran broadcaster and former diplomat whose last posting was as ambassador to Zimbabwe. — AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Malawi’s new President Joyce Banda on Tuesday unveiled a shake-up of top officials charged with government finances and media, purging […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8633,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[459],"tags":[2020,466,1072,953],"class_list":["post-8632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-peoples-party-2","tag-cleanup","tag-joyce-banda","tag-politics","tag-pp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8632","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=8632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8632\/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=8632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}