Our Comments on Textile Industry

Here is a hair-raising story. A Chinese Company has set up a large textile factory in Salima, and they are ready to begin producing. But there is one hiccup - Electricity. The company is begging the company to connect the factor to national greed.  https://malawifinancialmirror.blogspot.com/2019/08/china-africa-appeals-for-government.html

A few months ago, we commented on the fate of large projects in Malawi – why their execution lasts so long. https://malawifinancialmirror.blogspot.com/2019/03/our-guest-comment-mismanaging-large.html.  Big projects are awfully managed in Malawi. One explanation is that our bureaucrats have no interests in projects in which there are no kickbacks and workshops. So dossiers of such project lie in the shelves unattended.

Back to the Salima textile project. We have known that the project will need electricity and cotton. There seem to be no plans by the government to connect the plant to the national grid. The company needs 40,000 tons of cottons, but our production has fallen from a high of 100,000 to 10,000 tons.

Properly managed, the textile industry, with its many upstream and downstream linkages, can spearhead a dynamic export sector. However, for this to happen, we need a governments agency that oversees the projects. We have the MITC (Malawi Investment and Trade Corporation, which is supposed to be the one-stop link between investors and national governments authorities. It does not seem to be going much for the moment.