Paramount Holdings is slowly killing indigenous entrepreneurs: Why are we just watching? – Malawi Nyasa Times
It is a fact, Paramount Holdings is rising so sharply as a business empire, everyday winning small and large government tenders—by hook or crook—yet indigenous entrepreneurs, disadvantaged by little capital and capacity, continue to be left out, slowly eclipsing into oblivion.
Let me get this correct from the start. This article is not an open attack on Paramount Holdings—a foreign owned, yet locally registered conglomerate run by Indian directors.
Details indicate that the conglomerate has been around for some years, being involved in various sectors from manufacturing, construction, general supplies and retail.
However, it is only recent—arguably in the past three years—when Paramount Holdings has become a household name, always on the frontpages with business grabbing stories to the worse, allegedly, of forging documents to get a government tender. Of course, the matter is in court, as such, won’t delve much into it.
It must be underlined, though, that while Paramount Holdings is spreading its business wings taking over key government tenders there is always an outcry of budding indigenous businesses which we need to protect if this country is to develop meaningfully.
Saddled by high interest rates, low capital and high cost of production, indigenous owned companies are always at the disadvantage when it comes to getting government tenders. Even when they come together in partnership, these foreign owned by locally registered companies always have an edge which calls for some level of protection from the State.
Protectionism is always a sacred world in the realm of the so-called free trade. It is sacred because those who benefit from it—multinational companies, regulators and foreign owned company—manipulate the system to their appetites. They let a Standard 3 pupil compete MSCE exams with a Standard 8 one. They don’t subscribe to principles of fairness as the game of free trade is visibly and audibly skewed to the powerful.
We should never let this happen.
Government need to move radically and aggressively to protect our indigenous entrepreneurs. Activist Sylvestre Namiwa has consistently argued interestingly how, as a country, we operate retrogressively and then complain later.
He said: “We complain that we don’t have forex. Yet we borrow money from IMF to fund our agriculture and then hire companies from India and China to run the projects. How does the money stay home? We are a conduit nation.”
Instead of building capacities of our indigenous entrepreneurs, we let them face conglomerate such as Paramount Holdings to tramp on them and, in the name of free trade and in the worse of forging documents, we let them go scot free.
Equally troubling is that our systems, led by the regulators of the system, sit idle leaving everything to the courts when they should have been on the frontlines pushing measures that our indigenous entrepreneurs need to build their capacity.
The pains of our suffocating indigenous entrepreneurs will one day spill into a revolution that will shake the cornerstones of this nation. Malawians have no other home apart from here and we should be the first in enjoying our heritage.
We are never underlining—our policies are; that is why conglomerate such as Paramount Holdings will always reign supreme as locals continues to suffer.
Not anymore.
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