CHILUMPHA ACCUSES OPPOSITION FOR SABOTAGING COVID-19 PREVENTATIVE MEASURES

The country’s former vice president Cassim Chilumpha said the fight against the covid-19 pandemic in the country could be won if only the opposition political parties were not sabotaging governments’ efforts on the vise. In an interview, Chilumpha said the country’s opposition political parties were making a cheap politics of sabotaging government’s efforts on the fight against the pandemic in order to widen their political mileage. “Nowhere in the world the opposition political parties are sabotaging governments’ efforts on the vice, it’s only in Malawi. This is retrogressive indeed,” said Chilumpha. Among others, Chilumpha observed that the opposition parties use the judicially as a platform to frustrate the interventions, a situation which he said would go along the way to increase the spread of the pandemic. “The idea of using the courts to implement our wrong ideas is not good. The executive is the only arm of government entitled to put collective measures for us instead of having our own parallel set of measures. This would confuse and endanger our country,” he said. Recently, President Arthur Peter Mutharika declared Malawi a state of disaster due to the spread of corona virus which has since claimed lives of thousands of people across the world and at least infected some in the country. Mutharika in his statement called upon people in the country to remain calm and avoid gatherings that exceed 100 people as one way to address the further spread of corona virus which is now called covid-19. The president later recommended the lockdown as another measure against the pandemic. However, the political parties connived with some civil society groupings to frustrate the measure by seeking injunction in the court of law. Currently, reports are rife that the political parties are conniving with some stakeholders to pressurize the government to vacate some measures that it instituted.