Officials from the Department of Survey in the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development last week failed to address concerns raised by community members in Makanjira who claim to be victimised by Mozambican security agents following an extension of Mozambique\u2019s territory into Malawi.<\/p>\n
The ministry\u2019s Spokesperson, Charles Vintula, confirmed the visit to Makanjira and said the issue is now becoming complicated due to the claims of harassment by security forces, hence he hinted that the Ministry of Home Affairs will be involved soon.<\/p>\n
In December last year, Malawi and Mozambique officials met in Maputo where, among other things, they discussed the consequences of the 2008 World Bank-funded boundary retracing exercise which saw Malawi losing about six kilometres of its land at Makanjira to Mozambique.<\/p>\n
During the Maputo meeting, the two countries agreed that the new boundaries should not affect the social status of the affected people until August this year when a final decision will be made.<\/p>\n
But despite this agreement, Mozambican security agents have been patrolling the new boundary and are said to be harassing the people. Recently, the affected people complained to local authorities about the situation.<\/p>\n
This prompted the Malawi Government officials to summon their Mozambican counterparts to visit the affected communities to assess how the geographic reposition has affected them. The meeting, however, did not continue due to bad weather and some disagreements between locals and authorities.<\/p>\n
A member of the community, Adam Awasi, said some officials who visited the area were not interested to hear the members of the communities\u2019 side of the story.<\/p>\n
But Vintula said the officials from the two countries noted the issues and are working on finding solutions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government team, which also had officials from Mozambique, managed to appreciate how the people are affected by the changes and we hope that the next visit will come up with a solution to their challenges,\u201d Vintula said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Officials from the Department of Survey in the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development last week failed to address concerns raised by community members in Makanjira who claim to be victimised by Mozambican security agents following an extension of Mozambique\u2019s territory into Malawi. The ministry\u2019s Spokesperson, Charles Vintula, confirmed the visit to Makanjira and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":40637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42087,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42082\/revisions\/42087"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}