After firing his Trade minister, Sosten Gwengwe, yesterday, barely a day after protests erupted in the capital over a cost-of-living crisis, Malawi’s President Lazarus Chakwera said in Parliament that he wasn’t to blame for the hyperinflation that Malawi is currently facing.

Instead Chakwera claimed that an investigation by his government’s intelligence service had uncovered that some traders in collusion with an opposition party that’s represented in Malawi’s parliament was deliberately fuelling hyperinflation to destabilise his government ahead of September’s General elections. He said the opposition party wanted to capitalise on the pain being inflicted on innocent Malawians as a campaign tool that the unfair[currency] trading and illegal pricing of goods was his fault. He said it was betrayal of the Malawian people.

“Your plot to overthrown my government through this means by instigating an illegal hyperinflation of prices will not succeed” Chakwera said, directing the comments to the leaders of the said opposition party he alleges to be behind the crisis.

Chakwera has now appointed former Labour Minister Vitumbiko Mumba as the new Minister of Trade, and Peter Dimba as Minister of Labour.