President Lazarus Chakwera says he finds it odd that some Malawians have questioned the type of jobs created by his administration and want him to parade the people who received the 997,423 jobs.
Chakwera made the remarks yesterday in Parliament where he went to respond to questions from Parliamentarians.
He noted that some members of parliament questioned the figures he presented last week in his State of Nation Address in which he said his administration has created 997,423 jobs over the last year.
He observed that legislators asked if some of the jobs created could be regarded as jobs and some said that it was only seven months ago when Chakwera revealed that 600,000 jobs had been lost.
Chakwera said it is strange that when he talked about the 600,000 job losses, no one cared to ask him what kind of jobs had been lost or to parade the Malawians who lost jobs.
“But the moment I said that over 900,000 jobs had been created, suddenly many people who had good jobs start asking me to parade the Malawians who had received these jobs and questioning whether the income generating works of those Malawians count as jobs,” said Chakwera.
He added that he made the observation to show that there are people in Malawi who have made a career of putting Malawians down when they are winning and showing no concern when they are losing.
When responding to a question on youth–related jobs, Chakwera said people should not despise those who have jobs that are different from theirs.
He argued that it is not proper to only regard those recruited by government as having jobs while despising those recruited elsewhere.
“If we respect one another and every form of wealth creating activity, we will move forward,” he said.
Chakwera during the question time also revealed that his government is in the process of establishing several industrial parks in Lilongwe, Blantyre, and Mzuzu which government expects will create at least 240,000 direct jobs.
He said land for these areas has already been identified and a bill on the zones has already developed and will be tabled in Parliament.
One-hour jobs included in Malawi Government’s employment figures
