Former Reserve Bank of Malawi Governor, Dr Dalitso Kabambe fondly known as DK by his supporters, on Wednesday December 13, hosted 64 Members of Parliament of the mighty Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to an interactive meeting.
During the meeting, Dr Kabambe shared his insights into what has gone wrong in the Malawi economy since 2020 and what it would take to resuscitate the economy.
He opined that the current economic challenges manifested in form of rising cost of living and basic necessities; scarcity of foreign exchange and currency depreciation; rising cost of production and capital; and growing inequalities and poverty in Malawians are due to a large extent explained by poor economic policy mix of persistently elevated budget deficits, impotent monetary policy and continuing exchange rate misalignment.
Dr Kabambe went further to expound on the past, present and future prospects for the Real, External and Fiscal sectors of the Malawi economy.
Dr Kabambe observed that fluctuations in macroeconomic fundamentals of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), inflation, exchange rate, foreign exchange reserves and interest rates, have been the order of the day in Malawi since independence and that it depends on the prudency of the Administration in charge.
In particular, Dr Kabambe singled out the periods of the DPP led Administrations as being relatively stable with fairly strong growths of mean 6.5 percent between 2004 and 2012 and 4.5 percent between 2014 and 2019 compared to 1.2 percent between 2020 and 2022.
Dr Kabambe therefore called for unity of purpose in DPP to put the current Administration in check and guarantee a return to Government in 2025 so that the Party can restore back what it best knows, macroeconomic stability and strong economic growth which alone will benefit Malawians substantially.
Dr Kabambe also indicated intentions to contest at the Party’s upcoming Convention as President.