Good-bye Premier Bet & more –28th Sep 2023

Muli bwanji from BA! This is the Rorshok Malawi Update from the 28th of September twenty twenty-three A quick summary of what's going down in Malawi.

Premier Bet, one of Malawi’s biggest sports betting companies, will close shop on Saturday the 30th.

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According to a statement dated Tuesday the 26th, Premier Bet will be terminating their agreement with all their Malawi agents because they aren’t making profits, and the economic environment is deteriorating while their costs of operations increase. They also said their performance has decreased due to competitors. They said all their agents must stop ticket sales and operations before or during the termination date, return their equipment, and collect any outstanding balances or commissions.

If you bought your baby’s diapers from Santa Plaza store in Lilongwe, you may want to reconsider using them.

On Wednesday the 27th, the Malawi Bureau of Standards (or MBS) confiscated Pampers worth 40 million Kwacha, 370 thousand dollars, from Santa Plaza because they tampered with the expiry date. Raphael Mpingo, the Senior Certification Officer for MBS, said using expired pampers can be hazardous to babies’ skin.

The MBS found out that the diapers had expired last year due to an inspection exercise they conducted at the store.

Such offenses have a penalty of 3 million Kwacha, 2.7 thousand dollars, or six years imprisonment.

Veteran Politician John Tembo died on Wednesday the 27th. He was ninety-one, and the last of Malawi’s political fathers.

According to reports, Tembo was rushed to Lilongwe City Clinic last Monday to get treated for dehydration, pneumonia, and diabetes.

Tembo started his political journey in nineteen sixty, when Kamuzu Banda, Malawi’s first President, invited him to take a parliamentary seat in the Dedza South constituency. After that, he served as Finance Minister and continued to rise in political ranks. He resigned from politics in twenty thirteen after stepping down as president of the Malawi Congress Party.

Tributes have been pouring in for Tembo. While his fellow politicians have spoken highly of him, some locals had a few choice words for him, because he is connected to Kamuzu’s dictatorship, which many think was tyrannical.

In our last episode, we mentioned that a local man was found dead in his car’s backseat in a suspected murder case. This week, a similar death happened.

On the morning of Sunday the 24th, social media was awash with missing person posters for Agnes Katengeza, who had gone missing the day before—on Saturday the 23rd—after driving out to meet a client. She was a network administrator at the Reserve Bank of Malawi and a mobile retailer for cosmetics.

Around 2 PM, police found her car abandoned in Area 47 in Lilongwe. One passenger window was smashed. A few hours later, they found Katengeza’s bruised and lifeless body in the trunk of her car.

On the morning of Monday the 25th, the Malawi Police Service released a statement saying they were “zeroing in on the Lilongwe murder suspects”. That evening, a low-quality CCTV clip surfaced on social media. It showed four men leaving Katengeza’s car the night before.

Katengeza was laid to rest on Tuesday the 26th. Thousands of people, including David Young, the USA Ambassador to Malawi, went to the funeral.

Lilongwe had yet another gruesome murder, totaling three horrific killings in just eight days.

This time, the victim was Jacob Msokera, a soon-to-be graduate of the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources. He was set to graduate in November and was supposed to start working on the 1st of October.

He visited his parents in Lilongwe last week but went missing on Wednesday the 20th. He was found on Saturday the 23rd, in a well next to their home. He was tied up, and a huge stone was placed over his body.

Following the spate of killings in Lilongwe, a collation of human rights groups wrote a statement on Monday the 25th, expressing their “grave concern and unequivocal condemnation of the alarming wave of mysterious and brutal deaths”. They called the murders a security lapse and a threat to national security.

Among the human rights groups are the Human Rights Defenders Coalition and the Center for Human Rights and Rehabilitation.

In response, Ken Zikhale Ng’oma, the Minister of Homeland Security, said it is illogical to attribute the recent deaths to a national security breakdown, and warned social media users from spreading fake news, saying it is fueling tension in the country. He also said the government has hired cybercrime experts from Zimbabwe to train the citizenry on how to avoid cybercrime. He played down the deaths as though they were just another "event" and not something that has made locals start living in fear of being the next victim.

The Minister’s comment was called into question, as it might have been insensitive.

In lighter and hilarious news, the police are looking for Victor Banda, a middle-aged man from Bangwe township in Lilongwe, for painting his dog—an Africanis—in black tiger-like stripes to scare away loan recovery officers from the National Economic Empowerment Fund.

Moving on, on Friday the 22nd, the library and three laboratories of the Robert Blake Secondary School in Dowa were set on fire. Nancy Chaola Mdooka, the Deputy Minister of Education, told the students to evacuate. Authorities are yet to determine the cause of the incident.

Mdooka visited the school to assess the damage. She ordered the immediate closure of the school and directed authorities to hold the culprits accountable. She said the school should gradually re-open after two weeks, starting with Form 1 students, who she believes are victims of the senior student’s unruly behavior.

Reportedly, on Monday the 25th, over one hundred students got food poisoning at school.

A video circulating on social media showed students from Lunzu Secondary School in Blantyre lying down and screaming in agony, while others had fainted and were being carried into Mlambe Mission Hospital.

Anna Balley, the Principal Nursing Officer at Mlambe, said the students had stomach pain, diarrhea, and vomiting. However, she said most students were responding well to treatment.

According to a statement of the Blantyre District Health Office, their preliminary findings indicate the incident may have been caused by undercooked nsima, or nsima that was made from maize flour with Actellic—an insecticide used to protect grains like maize from storage pests.

The Ministry of Education ordered that the students be given rice only until the Health Office completes the investigations.

Next up, the Board of the National Commission for Science and Technology announced on Sunday the 24th that they appointed Gift Kadzamira as the Director General of the Commission.

Kadzamira has an enormous task ahead of her, considering that the National Commission for Science and Technology plays a huge role in the implementation of Malawi’s Vision twenty sixty-three, which is anchored in the development and integration of technology in the country.

Congratulatory messages have been pouring in for Kadzamira from organizations including the National Planning Commission, which works hand in hand with the Commission for Science and Technology on the Malawi twenty sixty-three Implementation Plan.

Congratulatory messages are also pouring in for Thokozani Unyolo, who was appointed as the Chief Executive Officer for Air Cargo Malawi Limited on Tuesday the 26th,

The Institute of Marketing and Rachel Sibande, the founder of Mhub, among others, have sent her well wishes.

Unyolo is considered one of the country’s best marketers. Many people, especially her fellow marketers and young women, think she is inspirational because of her ability to score roles outside of traditional marketing positions.

The Malawi University of Science and Technology (or MUST) will host its first-ever Culture, Research, and Innovation festival this weekend, starting from Friday the 29th to Saturday the 30th. The festival will be hosted at MUST’s Thyolo campus.

MUST will display research and innovations on Friday, and then on Saturday, they will have a cultural festival with performances from artists including Waliko Makhala and Keturah..

That’s it for this week! Thanks for joining us!

This Malawi Rorshok Update is one of the country-specific podcasts we do.

But we've been experimenting with other topics, and we have a new show about the Arctic, where we update you on everything going on North of the Arctic Circle. The Arctic Update is the third of the new series, along with the Ocean and Multilateral Updates.

You can look for them in your podcast listening app of choice or follow the links in the show notes! Tell your friends!

Pitani bwino!