Malawi’s Job Hunt Leads Increased Age Backdating.

By Joseph Dumbula.

Malawi continues to grapple with massive unemployment, with a state agency admitting in a statement that some people are attempting to backdate their dates of birth so as to earn slots in the police and army departments.

This is contained in a statement that the National Registration Bureau (NRB) has issued denouncing the act.

The NRB says in the growing tendency, some individuals, are approaching it in a bid to have their particulars such as Date of Birth on their National ID cards amended.

Principal Secretary for NRB, Mphatso Sambo, says they have been infuriated to learn that a few individuals, particularly those attempting to fetch openings inside the country's military and security offices, are drawing nearer their organization on the plausibility of having their Date of Birth changed. 

Sambo points out that changing the Date of Birth on National identity card is a restricted parameter which cannot be changed anyhow, stressing that such requests will not be entertained.

He adds that they are mandated by the National Registration Act of 2010 to protect the population register as presented by every citizen at the time of registration.

The unemployment rate in Malawi decreased to 5 percent in 2023 from 5.10 percent in 2022.

The figures averaged 5.02 percent from 1991 until 2023, reaching an all-time high of 5.80 percent in 2021 and a record low of 4.60 percent in 1997, according to the International Labor Office.

Recently, President Lazarus Chakwera caught the wrath of the opposition when he said din parliament that his regime has from 2020 created over a million jobs.

But opposition Democratic Progressive Party vocal member, George Chaponda who was once agriculture minister described the statistic as unreal as people more especially the youth are jobless with most private and public institutions closing their operations due to an underperforming economy.