![]() On Saturday, the British minister for development and Africa, Andrew Mitchell, said 27 members of the UK International Search and Rescue Team and six emergency medical personnel had left Birmingham airport for Malawi.The president of the Republic of Malawi ( Chichewa: Mtsogoleri wa Dziko la Malawi) is the head of state and head of government of Malawi. With all the problems the world is facing, calamity is something people get used to, he said, urging people not to “get weary” of helping. “The devastation and impact of this is the worst yet we have seen – many people have told me they have never seen anything like this in their lifetime.” “We need help, significant help from everyone, but we cannot necessarily be pointing the finger at one government because we understand everybody has troubles. But from 2015 to the moment, the help that has come from the British government has significantly been reduced. Last month, Nick Hepworth, executive director of Water Witness International, criticised the British government for slashing its contribution to the £90m Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters programme, known as BRACC in Malawi, as part of the UK’s 2021 cut to the aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP.Ĭhakwera said: “We understand that the British government has had its own problems. This is the vision we wanted to be casting, a country that can stand on its own feet.” To give hope that Malawi can become a developed nation with industrialisation, to give young people more of a future than sustenance farming, to have modern sustainable agriculture. So many of them grow up poor, it’s part of life. ![]() Malawian people to their credit are resilient people. We need roads, we need hospitals and schools. “Once the rains subside we will need to help these families stand on their own two feet. “Even the doctors need support as well after dealing with so much trauma. “It is clear there will be psychological as well as social needs because of the depth of trauma people have suffered,” he said. As it dissipated on 15 March, meteorologists said it was the longest-lasting and most travelled tropical cyclone ever recorded.Ĭhakwera said he visited Blantyre hospitals on Friday. “We are in a perpetual cycle of trying to pull ourselves up and getting knocked back down.”Ĭyclone Freddy first developed off Australia in early February and travelled almost 5,000 miles across the Indian Ocean, making landfall twice in south-east Africa, bringing torrential rains, high winds and killing more than 700 people across Mozambique, Madagascar, Zimbabwe and Malawi, including 16 onboard a Taiwanese-flagged ship. “We had been trying to build back from Cyclone Idai in 2019, and then the pandemic, now Freddy. The 67-year-old former pastor pointed out that Malawi had been hit by three cyclones within 13 months. It’s not a matter of saying be charitable to your neighbour, this has to do with loss and damage, this has to do with responses that are not tokenism.” ![]() “I just feel that we need to be talking about this, keeping the conversation alive. “It’s not just here and there, we are at the receiving end of the worst of the climate change. “Some 36 roads are broken, nine bridges washed away, and cases still where people are stranded, whole villages we can’t reach. We have set up temporary camps and food is needed, shelter, yes, but must go past that and build stronger because of the damage. “We are suffering and we can’t meet the needs. “We need everyone’s help and support for this tragedy to be mitigated,” he said. “The damage is across 13 districts, almost half the country, and it is not just the numbers of our people who have lost their lives, but the damage and devastation,” said Chakwera, who added that while the country’s early warning system had saved lives in some lower-lying areas, it had failed in others, and the landslides that devastated the city of Blantyre had been especially unexpected. “This demonstrates that climate change issues are real and we are standing right in the path of it,” said Chakwera, who added that the climate crisis had the potential to keep “a national like Malawi in perpetual poverty”.īy Saturday, the death toll in Malawi stood at 438 and families and rescuers spent the weekend digging through mud and rubble, often with their bare hands, looking for the missing.
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