Thomson Mpinganjira challenges engineers on energy
Engineers in the country have been challenged to find a long-lasting solution to the persistent water and electricity problems, which have increased the cost of living for most Malawians.
FDH Holdinds Chief Executive Officer, Thomson Mpinganjira, said in Mangochi when he opened this year’s Malawi Institute of Engineers (MIE) annual conference which is being held jointly with the sixth Engineers without Borders conference.
Mpinganjira said due to the persistent power outages, the cost of doing business in the country has gone high, a situation which he said is also forcing companies to put and additional mark-up on the final products.
As a result, Mpinganjira said, customers are being forced to pay more for a product which could have otherwise been bought at a lower cost if the country hard reliable power supply.
“We cannot continue like the way it is at the moment. The issue of power and water is critical for every economy and results for Malawi’s failure to have reliable power supply is visible through the challenges and increase in production cost for most products,” he said.
Mpinganjira said most of the solutions which the country is employing to solve the electricity shortfalls are temporally, hence the need for the country’s engineers to consult their fellows from other countries in the quest of finding a lasting solution.
He also bemoaned the failure by the engineers to find an alternative source of energy for the rural masses, as a means of stopping them from relying on trees and other natural resources for domestic use.
MIE president, David Mzandu, urged engineers to find ways of improving the country’s natural resources into final products, which can improve lives of Malawians.
He said, for a long time, engineers in Malawi and Africa as a whole have been failing to introduce innovations that can benefit lives of Malawians by, among other things, adding value to the raw resources to produce products, which can help save the available natural resources.
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