By Yankho Phiri
Kasungu, August 05, Mana: Minister of Labour, Kenny Kandodo has revealed that the government of Malawi through his ministry has finalized preparation of job creation centers in four major cities and municipalities in the country.
The minister disclosed the development on Tuesday, in Kasungu, where he was meeting Press Corporation and Press Agriculture Limited (PAL) senior officials, where he was lobbying them to be part of creating jobs in the country towards one million jobs that the Tonse alliance government promised.
Kandodo said that the government upon realizing that it has limited vacant posts that are far less than a million they have embarked on meeting potential key employers from the private sector in the country.
He said these potential employers can create several posts if they resume and scale up their business like PAL and Illovo Sugar Corporation just to mention a few.
“As a government that is looking forward to creating more jobs as it can; we have come up with a decision of establishment of job creation centers in the four country’s cities and municipalities,” he said.
He added: “In these job centres job seekers will be going to look for vacancies of that day as well as submitting their profile curriculum vitaes for job employers to easily find them as a lot of these job seekers does not manage to buy newspapers on daily basis to look for vacancies.”
In his remarks board chairperson for PAL, Dr. Peter Ngoma said their company is fully supportive of creating jobs only if the government guarantees them with good policies and a market for 50,000 metric tons of maize to be produced and being sold in the country or outside.
“As PAL we have got adequate resources to employ up to 31,000 permanent people and 100,000 seasonal employees within a period of five years,” he said.
He however, asked the government to come up with better policies and an exporting certificate for crops like maize and legumes or either giving them internal market.
He added that their company has only 300 permanent staff at the moment as it is only focusing on seed multiplication which they supply to companies like Monsanto, and described it as a small business for them to employ some more people.
The company further asked government to consider deploying interns from agricultural institutions like Luanar to equip them with practical knowledge and help them with agriculture research.
Press Agriculture Limited was once a big employer across the country between 1970-90s but collapsed in 2000s with the falling of tobacco industry.
