The National Organization of Nurses and Midwives of Malawi (NONM) has re-elected Shouts Makhumbo Galang’anda Simeza as its president at its recent Biennial General Assembly.

Simeza amassed  111 votes out of 150 beating his contestant Mathews Saindi by a wide margin.

In an interview Simeza expressed excitement for being re-elected into office and said that he is also aware that NONM is big.

He said: “The first feeling is that of acknowledging that NONM is a big organization and that being big it means there’s a lot of work and demand. You know, it is a member based organization and so you’ve got to strive to work very hard, you know, in recruiting, motivating and empowering the membership.”

“The other side of the feeling is excitement being re-elected it means the owners of the organization nurses themselves have trust in me having observed how we have fared, how we have performed in the past four years and so they are giving yet another term for the next four years,” he added.

Simeza also said that he has a couple of plans that he will pursue in the next four years but the immediate issues he will look into are retirement processes for nurses in CHAM institutions, research mentorships and Jobs in Diaspora for nurses and midwives.

He said: “The first activity that I and my team will be embarking on will be to identify strategies in the process of retirement for nurses and midwives that is very critical. You will recall we had this scandal that our colleague who worked in CHAM for over 35 years only got 3 million as retirement, so that is unfortunate and therefore we need to start now preparing each other as nurses and midwives.

The second new activity that I will be embarking on is the basic research mentorship. You know we are sitting on resources that are untapped. We have nurses and midwives who are our members working in research based institutions; Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust, JPIEGO, John Hopkins, UNC; they’re doing research, so we would want to find the resources and have a project activity that would have these nurses working in these institutions pairing and mentoring those that are in the civil service especially doing basic research as we live in the era of evidence based practice.

The third new activity that will be embarking on in the next four years is the jobs in diaspora. Of course, we started this exercise but it was kept on hold because of the guidelines from the Ministry of Labour, so we will be pushing on this one with other ministries, ministry of foreign affairs, ministry of homeland security and the line ministry of health, you know, so that we see our colleagues who are not employed that are willing to go in diaspora  to go.”

Positions in the National executive Council (NEC) which have been filled by new faces include that of the Second Vice-president, South East and South West Zone chairpersons, National Treasurer and Vice National Treasurer.