By all standards, 19 out 44 new born babies dying every 28 days in a district such as Mzimba is a scandal that should attract presidential commissions of inquiry and heads should roll at the end of such a process.
This would be true when you get to hear the reasons behind this calamity.
It is all down to poor health delivery at the main district hospital and its 31 peripheral health centres as a result of funding cuts by the DPP government.
According to the DC for the district Thomas Chirwa, who was uncharacteristically honest unlike other lying civil servants, Treasury has thought it wise to appropriate to Mzimba District Hospital only K3.6 million out of the normal monthly K15 million.
But this story is not limited to Mzimba. It is a story just about everything in this administration.
The DPP government, because it has no clue on how to take the economy out of the intensive care unit, let alone widening the tax base, is chopping funding to just every other department except State House.
One would have thought social delivery systems such as health would be spared the chop.
But nay, the health system is the worst victim as the Mzimba incident is clearly demonstrating.
The poor from the rural Malawi have borne the full blunt of the deep cuts to healthcare and the inevitable results are what we are witnessing in Mzimba.
This amounts to genocide and the DPP government is doing it intentionally. It cannot run away from this.
Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe has made it a point these days to talk to all who care to listen about the so-called obscene take home package of what he calls the Super Executives who are paid over K14 million per month in the private sector.
Through his fear mongering that it is such obscene private sector opulence that nearly brought down US Wall Street and was only bailed out by government, Gondwe has managed to convince MPs who have advised him to tax such high earners.
Being aware of the Finance Ministers’ propensity for taxing just anything in sight, I know it is just a matter of time before Gondwe wields the chop on these high earners in the private sector.
It is a sacrifice that the CEOs and MDs of this country will have to bear very shortly.
But I keep asking myself is: What about Gondwe himself, his fellow Cabinet Ministers and ultimately the President going to do to also take part in this needed sacrifice?
They still have their one thousand litres of fuel per month and the President has kept his mile long convoy of cars with the State House proposing to buy more fuel guzzlers this year.
Why is Gondwe not talking about the inefficiencies in government that can save a lot of money and stop the deaths in Mzimba and other parts of the country where poor Malawians are dying like tsetse flies of Kasungu National Park?
It is because he has lost his famed old Midas touch.
Instead Gondwe thinks the only way to make money for government is to tax Malawians.
But this has its limit and tax payers cannot pay up enough tax to go round if they are not making it.
Because there is no money in Treasury as the Malawi Revenue Authority is constantly under collecting– it said this on its own and correctly attributed it to a dead economy—children and wives of poor people are dying in Mzimba and elsewhere.
This government has blood on its hands and it does not seem to care.
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