Monze District commissioner Joyce Nondo has challenged the department of buildings to monitor construction works before certificates of completion are on any infrastructure funded by Government.
Speaking during the District Development Coordinating Committee (DDCC) meeting held at the council conference unit on Tuesday, Mrs.Nondo said that a number of constructions under Government projects were not done up to expected standards.
She said that some buildings were indicating signs of collapsing because no proper supervision and monitoring had been carried out.
The District Commissioner said that Government was spending a lot of money on various developmental projects and expected its officers to ensure that contractors do not do shoddy works.
She cited the newly constructed hostels for Monze School of Nursing at Muchuya in Monze which she said was done haphazardly because it had already developed cracks before it could be completed.
Mrs.Nondo called on the infrastructure sub-sector committee of the DDCC to work together with the department of buildings and all other members with skilled manpower in order to avoid waste of resources by redoing structures.
She also warned against misappropriation of public funds meant for various projects adding that there was also need to stick to Government procurement procedures whenever materials for construction of infrastructure were being purchased.
However during the same meeting it was revealed that Monze District had embarked on developing an investment profile for the purpose of the twining concept of Southern province of Zambia with Guanzxi province of the People’s Republic of China.
Monze District deputy planning officer Mazuba Kalyabantu said that Southern province was twinned last year with the Guanzxi province for the purpose of economic, infrastructure development, trade, capacity development, tourism, culture, sport, agriculture and local governance.
Mr.Kalyabantu told members of the DDCC that the main objective of the twinning programme was to develop favorable cooperation and explore channels of exchange on the basis of equality, mutual respect and mutual benefits.
He said that the implementation of the concept will involve consultation between the two provinces in conjunction with central Government of the two Countries through their sector ministries and other relevant institutions.
Mr.Kalyabantu added that each District was expected to prepare a District profile towards the concept and Monze District has already prepared one but called for more submissions towards the profile before it could be submitted.
He said once the concept is implemented successfully the Monze District like other Districts in Southern province will benefit from job creation and wealth creation that will help reduce poverty by improving people’s livelihoods.
ZANIS
A combined team of Zambia Police services and the fisheries department at the weekend arrested seven men for unlawful possession of 886 kilogrammes of dry and fresh fish during the fish ban contrary to CAP 200 of the laws of Zambia.
Namwala District Fisheries technician Mr Daniel Chiludika confirmed the arrest of the suspects to ZANIS in an interview yesterday.
Mr Chiludika identified the suspects as Mr Lameck Katami, Mr Bernard Kasanga, Mr Morris Muluti, Mr Robert Nasilele, and Mr Sitali Namagolwa.
Others were Mr Abel Nakamana, and Mr Herbert Cheelo all of Manyona fishing camp east of Namwala District along the Kafue River.
Mr Chiludika said the amount of dry fish seized indicate that suspects have been fishing with impunity since the fish ban came into effect.
“When you look at the amount of dry fish we seized it is evident that these people have been fishing and drying the fish since the ban came into effect on 1st December 2011,” said Mr Chiludika.
He said his department would intensify patrols to ensure that people found wanting were brought to book.
“Fishermen should understand that the government’s intention is to ensure breeding of fish during the fish ban so that people who depend of fishing as a source of livelihood can have food security,” Mr
Chiludika said.
Mr Chiludika, however, appealed to the government to ensure consistent funding during fish ban period to enable the department effectively enforces the fish ban in more than 47 fishing camps.
Since the fish ban came into effect more than 20 people in Namwala District have been arrested and subsequently sentenced to prison for been in unlawful possession of fish during the ban.
The seven suspects would appear in court, Tuesday this week.
A 32-year-old woman is lying hopelessly at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre after she was ruthlessly attacked by her master’s vicious dogs in the city on Sunday morning.
Witnesses say the woman Margaret Tebulo met her fate around 6am as she reported for normal duties at her workplace. Tebulo works as a maid at a well known Blantyre based transporter Ninkawa Bulks at Magalasi area.
“As usual the woman arrived at her workplace at around 6am. Immediately after entering the compound the dogs charged at her and started mauling her,” a guard who works close to the scene of incident said.
He added: “At that time security guards were not near the scene and when they heard the violent sound of the dogs it was too late.”
The woman is alleged to have been attacked by six vicious dogs owned by owner of Ninkawa Bulks Limited.
While police have said they are not aware of the attack, the woman is currently battling for her life at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, Ward 5A.
Efforts to talk to the employer proved futile as the phones both ground and mobile were not picked.
This is the third case in a space of few months where workers have been attacked by vicious dogs belonging to their employers.
The first serious dog attack incident happened in Lilongwe where a 73-year old Cephas Chimdima was heavily maimed and lost some facial parts after being attacked by five vicious dogs belonging to a South African national Dean Van Schalhwal.
Schalhwal accepted to foot the medical bills for Chimdima’s plastic surgery which was conducted in South Africa. But the victim’s face remains deformed.
Reji Joseph: Another dog attack victim
After the attack fury engulfed Malawi after the South African national connived with a hospital official to illegally obtain HIV status details of the victim to find out if the dogs had contracted HIV from the blood of the Malawian guard.
President Bingu wa Mutharika was also angry with the development and made a rare outburst condemning foreign nationals who ill-treat citizens in their country.
A visibly angry Mutharika warned that he would not tolerate foreigners treating Malawians “worse than dogs”.
“I won’t accept foreigners to come here and treat Malawians worse than dogs, I don’t have room for white people treating Malawians like dogs,” said Mutharika.
The other incident occurred in Blantyre where 10 dogs belonging to Malawian of Asian origin Gabriel Fernandos attacked his cook, Reji Joseph.
Just like Chimdima, Joseph lost both ears and sustained very deep cuts as he wrestled with the dogs.
Meanwhile, Reji Joseph has finally been discharged from the Queens Hospital where he had been admitted for about two months. Nyasa Times
Senior chief Mwewa of the Ngumbo people in Samfya has complained of incessant harassment by some of his subjects among them his relatives, opposed to his chieftainship.
The chief says that some people, including his relatives, have not accepted his chieftainship, and are constantly harassing him.
He says he now feels insecure and has asked for police protection at his palace.
He was speaking when Luapula province minister Besa Chimbaka called on him at his palace over-the-weekend.
Senior chief Mwewa told the minister that at the time he expressed interest to contest the election to become chief, none of his relatives or members of the royal family to the throne questioned his eligibility.
However, he said since ascending to the throne some members of the royal family have refused to accept him as the eligible heir and losing candidates are now petitioning his chieftainship
Is it possible for a seemingly good and stable relationship to head to the rocks with just a few taps on a mobile phone’s keypad? Apparently yes.
We cannot imagine our lives without mobile phones, yet they are the same gadgets that are stirring quite a number of conflicts in relationships today.
Two weeks ago a woman shared her story, with the Saturday Magazine, of how after snooping on her husband’s phone, she found what she called “near pornographic texts”.
Her marriage appeared fine until she started scouring her man’s phone for evidence. She found intimate exchanges between him and his supposed lover that shattered her rosy outlook of her marriage.
Some of the responses to the story from our readers suggested that the woman should not have gone sniffing around for trouble on her husband’s phone. That it was all her fault that her marriage was now suffering.
Some even told her “What you know doesn’t hurt you’ as they castigated her for snooping. But in reality, there are many more of her kind, who are willing to ignore the rules of netiquette in their pursuit for incriminating evidence.
A study by three universities in the UK last year found that one out of five spouses snoop on their partners’ emails and text messages. The survey also found that women were more likely than men to snoop.
The snooping takes the form of checking someone’s emails, text messages, posts on social media websites, and browser history; installing monitoring software on a partner’s phone, or even posing as someone else to contact a partner.
Up to no good
Many people begin snooping on their partners when they suspect that the partner is up to no good, and want evidence to confirm their fears. It could be that your partner is never comfortable answering calls in your presence, or that his or her call register and inbox are always empty when you check.
Perhaps he has a security code on his phone, or you just want to find out who your partner is constantly sending text messages or emailing during the wee hours of the night. Such signs can send the message that your man or woman has something to hide.
Sometimes there is nothing to worry about, but there may be times when you get the nagging feeling that there is something you need to know, something fishy going on, and that the evidence is on his phone or laptop. Or maybe you just want to reassure yourself that everything is fine and going through his phone will reaffirm that you are the only woman in his life.
However, there are those who find the damning evidence they were looking for and go on to confront their partners.
Mercy, a sales representative, has been caught up in the SMS web before. The first time her boyfriend found flirtatious messages, he confronted her about it, but her defense calmed him down for a while.
“In sales, you have to give your contact information to your clients and the down side is that some of my male clients continuously send flirtatious messages or even send sexts (suggestive or sexually explicit text messages). We fight about text messages all the time and even though I explain the situation to him, he does not get it. Just because someone sent you a raunchy SMS does not mean there is anything going on between you,” Mercy sighs with frustration.
Mercy now thinks that her boyfriend of three years installed monitoring software on her phone.
“He confronts me even about messages that I deleted immediately after reading. He tells me who sent the message, the exact time the message was sent and the content. How else can one tell you such details unless they have you on surveillance?” Mercy asks.
Mercy’s suspicions are not far-fetched. A new mobile phone spying software was introduced into the Kenyan market last year. The software that goes by the name Juju works like black magic and promises to help you catch your cheating spouse without being detected.
Once installed, it taps into the ‘suspect’s’ phone and forwards all text messages and calls directly to your phone. You can even listen in on all calls and find out who your partner is talking to and what they are talking about.
However, George Njoroge the Managing Director of Juju Limited realises that fire can only be fought with fire, and his company offers counter-surveillance software for those who have something to hide.
Dubbed SMS private bag, this software directs all your messages to a private folder, which only you have access to. The snooping girlfriend or husband will never get to read any suspicious messages as they are deleted from your inbox and re-directed to the private folder.
But 35-year-old electrician, Ben, finds the idea of installing spy ware on his wife’s phone rather ridiculous.
“What kind of marriage is that where you now turn into a detective against the very person you are supposed to truest most?” He muses.
Ben swears that for the 10 years he has been married, he has never had reason to monitor his wife’s calls or text messages. He insists that if you cannot trust your spouse and have to keep watching her and poring over her bag looking for incriminating evidence, then you have no business being married to her.
Ben says that he leaves his phone lying around and has no problem when his wife answers calls on his phone even though female clients call him sometimes after working hours.
He narrates how one of his clients once called and played a prank on his wife, asking her who she was in that house, as if to suggest that the caller was the other woman in Ben’s life. But at the end of the call, the female client clarified that she was just testing Ben’s wife to see her reaction.
“My wife later told me about that incident and we laughed about it,” Ben remembers.
Ben believes that if someone is straying, you do not have to snoop around to find this out because the truth will reveal itself with time.
“But even if you find something fishy, do not be quick to accuse your partner. First investigate and be sure of the facts and when you confront her with the information, her reaction will tell you subtly whether you are overreacting or whether you are on to something,” he adds.
Finding a string of texts between your wife and another man would likely make any man angry and bitter especially if the man on the other end is your wife’s ex-boyfriend.
Mwangi, a programme assistant with a local non-governmental organisation, had to deal with suspicious messages he found accidentally on his wife’s phone. Mwangi, 26, married last year and even before they had settled into marriage, his wife’s ex started sending her flirtatious messages.
“My wife and I share phones and I found the messages when I was using her phone to send a text,” he says.
Before he mustered the courage to bring the issue up, his wife raised the subject, herself, showed him the messages and they resolved the issue together.
But Mwangi did not let go so easily. He called the man to tell him off, but all he got were insults. However, the man stopped sending the offensive messages. Mwangi says that because his wife was open about the messages, the issue did not result in conflict and mistrust.
“There should be no secrets in marriage, you just have to discuss such things openly if you want to avoid issues of mistrust,” Mwangi advises.
Real culprits
Many of those who confessed to snooping agree that before they started fishing around in their partner’s phones, their relationships appeared somewhat healthy, but nosing around changed all that.
Relationship therapists warn that it is not the phones that are causing the problem, but rather people start snooping because there is something going wrong with the relationship.
Naomi James, a marriage therapist at Oasis Africa Counselling Institute, concurs that for a significant number of couples who seek marriage therapy, the conflict arose from mobile phone communication disputes.
One partner or the other peeks into the phone and finds what he or she thinks is a damning message or call and that sets the stage for frequent fights and mistrust. Yet phones are not the real culprits in the breakdown of relationships.
“If you have to sneak around your partner looking for tell tale signs and messages, then there is an issue of mistrust in your relationship already,” Naomi says.
The marriage therapist says that only being open with each other and rebuilding trust can save such a relationship.
But she cautions that there is a possibility that the other party’s fears may not be unfounded.
“If you are in constant communication with another person of the opposite sex, you need to be alert and conscious. A casual friendship can develop into something deeper with frequent communication and spending too much time together alone,” she warns.
Sinazongwe residents are up in arms with the Chinese Collum Coal Mine (CCM) management for discharging coal effluent into Sikalamba River which is the source of their water and for their animals .
The residents have charged that coal effluent is the root cause of cholera out break that have already claimed two lives in sinazeze.
Speaking on behalf of Sinazeze residents Modestar Siakaulu appealed to the Chinese management to build ponds to ensure that the coal effluent was charged safely than allowing it flow into the stream.
Ms Siakaulu said the CCM has no under grounds toilets and the miners answer the call of nature within the tunnels.
She alluded that people living along the stream create wells and use the contaminated water which is resulting into perpetual cholera outbreak.
ZANIS also found that children were swimming into the stream that has contaminated water.
Cholera out break has so far claimed t of five lives in two months and 55 people have since been treated of the disease.
Last year Cholera broke out at the CCM as result of poor hygiene and the mine was closed for some weeks until sanitation was restored.
