Survival of the fittest

Twenty-eight-year-old Ali Mdala walks for six kilometers every day from Chinsapo Township to Lilongwe Central Business District to sell laundry soap.

His wife and their child depend on the day’s sales for food. He plies his trade at the forbidden Lilongwe Bridge. He sells a bar of soap at K200.

One Thursday, we visited him at his business place at 2pm.

Mdala and his friend were eating nsima placed on plastic paper. The two had put together some money for their first meal of the day.

We tracked him from 2pm to 7pm. We noted that, on average, he could sell one bar of soap per hour.

The sales for the day ended at 6pm, realising K5,800, but he could not buy anything for his family for fear of spending his capital.

We followed him to his house at Chinsapo, a distance which he sometimes walks whenever he does not have K300 for a bus.

We reached his house at around 6:45pm.

On this day, he was lucky as we picked him up in our office vehicle, saving him from a walk for the night. Darkness welcomed us as his house had no source of light. We used our mobile phones’ torch for lighting.

The few belongings we saw in the house included a few plastic kitchen wares and a handful of maize flour at the corner of the one bedroom house.

“I struggle to get daily food for my family. My business is not ticking. I usually buy a wokomani (half kilogramme of maize flour packed in a plastic paper) for food every day.

“Sometimes I think of quitting and going back to the village but I do not have transport. Life also has challenges in the village,” he said.

We bade him farewell as he remained seated while leaning against the wall in the dark and looking tired. His pair of trousers was torn and the shirt had a tattered collar.

Mdala is just one of the thousands of Malawians facing urban poverty.

Agnes Thomas, a mother of four, who sells roasted maize and groundnuts, and using a capital of K5,000, sees no educational future for her children; the business cannot because she cannot make ends meet.

She says one of her daughters dropped out of school while in form two because of lack of fees.

“Sometimes we eat nsima (staple food) once a week and, in some cases, I eat maize meant for sale. I have no choice but to ensure that the children have something to eat,” Thomas said.

We also found another woman, Fyness Daniel, 39, selling apples, 30 in total.

“I bought the apples four days ago. After sales, I buy a kilogramme of flour for food for my family,” she said.

Pilirani Nkhonya, who sells notebooks, said: “I really want to live in the city but life is unbearable. I wanted to go back to the village, but I changed my mind because people are also struggling there.”

Many city dwellers survive on small-scale businesses and the capital sum can be as low as K5,000.

Most of them live in rented houses with no electricity, paying as less as K10,000 per month. The business stops whenever they fall sick.

Minister of Information Moses Kunkuyu said there are efforts that the government is making to transform Malawi into an industrialised one, thereby creating more jobs which will help in eradicating poverty.

He cited fiscal discipline, serious fight against corruption, the non interupted power supply, coming in of the mining regulatory authority, removal of visa fees from major tourists’ origin countries, the mega farms and the digitalisation as some of the efforts.

“We will begin transforming this country into an industrialised one thereby creating more jobs which will help in eradicating poverty,” Kunkuyu said.

Nevertheless, he said, globally, natural shocks and other unforeseen circumstances like wars have had a negative impact on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Centre for Social Concern (CfSC) fears that if people living in vulnerable conditions do not receive proper support, poverty levels would persist, and there would be social unrest, economy among others.

“To avoid these outcomes, a comprehensive approach that combines short-term relief measures with long-term development strategies is essential,” CfSC Project Officer Kondwani Hara said.

Hara also called for collaboration among stakeholders including the government, development partners and non-governmental organisations, to find better ways of supporting the poor.

Consumers Association of Malawi (Cama) has also indicated that urban poverty has, indeed, risen with inflation at around 28 percent, worsening the situation for urban dwellers.

Cama Executive Director John Kapito said urban poverty is exacerbated by the country’s emphasis on production for consumption instead of exporting and the weakening of the Kwacha.

“The current figures do indicate that poverty levels have increased, especially in urban areas, where people mostly rely on the formal market to do their shopping and day-today-business,” he said.

Kapito suggested that more resources should be channelled towards production to be able to export, which would also create jobs.

Malawi is among the countries in the world doing badly on the attainment of the United Nations (UN) 17 SDGs, especially two of them; ending poverty and hunger by 2030.

According to the World Bank, 50.7 percent of Malawians are currently living in poverty.

And the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee report released in August 2023 indicates that 4.4 million Malawians are going to face hunger in the 2023-24 season.

The UN report, on the progress of SDGs, titled ‘2023 Sustainable Development Goals Report Special Edition’, says more than 50 percent of targets of the SDGs are weak, while 30 percent stalled or went into reverse.

“These include key targets on poverty, hunger and climate. Unless we act now, the 2030 agenda could become an epitaph for a world that might have been,” reads part of the report signed by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

The UN has attributed the situation to the Covid pandemic and the triple crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution amplified by the Russia-Ukraine war resulting in the increased prices of food and energy, among other impacts.

The UN has since called on the need for ambitious benchmarks to eradicate poverty and reduce inequality focusing on key areas by expanding social protection and decent jobs.

With seven years to the attainment of the SDGs, will Malawi be among the countries that will have kicked out poverty and hunger?