Government medicines on sale in Tanzania, Parliament demands answers

Medicines stamped "Malawi Government" are being sold openly at Kariakoo Market in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. That is the alarm raised by the Parliamentary Committee on Health chairperson, Anthony Masamba, who spoke to local media on Saturday, 4 October. Among the drugs allegedly on sale abroad: Panadol and amoxicillin, both marked as government property, as reported by Malawi24.

Masamba said national availability of essential medicines currently sits at 75 percent, a figure he described as "dire." The picture at central hospitals is far worse. At Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Zomba Central, Kamuzu Central in Lilongwe, and Mzuzu Central Hospital, availability dropped as low as 18 percent at its lowest point, something Masamba said had never been recorded before. To put it plainly: if Queen Elizabeth, which serves the entire southern region, was supposed to receive 100 packets of Panadol, only 18 arrived.

Masamba said that just a week before he spoke to the press, he received reports from across the country that patients are dying because hospitals have run out of drugs. The theft, he said, is not happening at one point. It cuts across the entire supply chain, from sole-sourced procurement deals at the top, through what he called "drug privilege," where medical practitioners are themselves diverting medicines, all the way down to pharmacies and even medicine-producing companies that collude in the racket.

The Health Committee will now investigate how drugs released to public hospitals end up on foreign markets, and will review gaps in the procurement process that allow the theft to continue. Masamba said the committee will also set out its position on the Pharmacy and Medicines Regulatory Authority (PMRA) Act. That law, according to Nation Online, was enacted as far back as February 2019 but still has no approved regulations in place, with the government now targeting December 2026 to finalise them.

The Ministry of Health's Principal Secretary, Dan Namarika, confirmed to Nation Online, on the sidelines of a Public Accounts Committee meeting, that theft is eating into every effort to keep the Central Medical Stores Trust and public facilities stocked. Health Minister Madalitso Baloyi has separately said government is reviewing existing laws to introduce stiffer penalties for those convicted of stealing medicines.

For Malawi's Muslim community, and for any person of conscience, the meaning of what is happening here is plain. Medicines procured with public money, meant for the sick and the poor, are an amanah. Stripping a hospital ward of Panadol or antibiotics so they can be sold at a market stall across the border is not merely a crime. It is a direct betrayal of that trust, and its cost is counted in lives.