Minister of Justice Charles Mhango has called for stronger collaboration between legal and medical professionals to protect patients’ rights and ensure accountability when medical errors occur.

In Malawi, drug stores and private clinics have become as common as grocery stalls, sprouting in towns and villages alike.

Most are run by trained medical professionals who, beyond their calling to heal, have embraced entrepreneurship to supplement meagre government salaries.

Yet this pursuit of profit has opened a dangerous trade. Behind the counters, pharmacies are quietly breaking the law, selling prescriptiononly sexual enhancement pills, the so called blue tablets, without medical approval.

In this article, reporters Innocent Kumchedwa and Eamon Piringu investigate how the very people entrusted to save lives are fuelling a silent crisis.

Their findings reveal a deadly pattern: men lured by promises of pleasure are buying the pills freely, unaware of the risks. From January to June alone, five have died. What began as a side business for survival has become a perilous gamble with human life.

The Malawi Environment Protection Authority (MEPA) says the long-delayed Mulalo Granular Fertiliser Production Factory in Dowa has completed the environmental approval process and is now awaiting an environmental certificate, as Parliament investigates what stalled the investment.

Africa’s future development ambitions could be undermined unless countries urgently address gaps in foundational learning, education leaders warned on Wednesday as they opened a continental meeting in Lilongwe.