The Municipality is calling for the public to nominate people in their communities to stand in for the Living Legends awards. Nominees should be people who were born within the Municipal area and who have excelled in the following categories: music, sports, arts and drama, politics and social responsibility. This will be the third Living Legends Awards to be held in September.

Director of the Local History Museum, Mlungisi Ngubane, said the Municipality intends to award or recognise people who have done exceptionally well in their respective fields. These should be individuals whom communities feel have made valuable contributions to society and deserve to be respected and honoured, he said.

Mr Kanjanga is a farmer from Ntcheu District in Phambala, Malawi. In 1975, having seen the deteriorating effect that the application of chemical fertilisers was having on his crops, he decided to return to the composting techniques he had seen used by his father in the 1930s. His crops started to improve so significantly that he decided to set up the Lipangwe Organic Manure Demonstration Farm (LOMADEF) in 1980 so as to share his learning with fellow farmers. He decided that the most effective way to make sure that the learning reached as many people as possible would be to train community members to act as Agricultural Advisors in their communities. LOMADEF set about carefully selecting Agricultural Advisors on the basis of their innovative approach to farming, training them in sustainable farming techniques and in communication and facilitation skills so they can pass on their learning to fellow farmers.

Eveline Msngwa, an Agricultural Advisor from Bwese village, has been working with LOMADEF for ten years. The land that she and her husband Charles own is a textbook in sustainable farming practices. In one corner of the field are three heaps of harvested maize. The first heap was planted using only chemical fertilisers, the second using a basal compost top dressed with chemical fertiliser and the third using basal compost and liquid manure. ‘As you can see each heap is more or less the same size. Our fellow farmers can clearly see that there is little to gain in using chemical fertiliser. In fact when you use chemical fertiliser you effectively make a loss because you spend more money on the crop!’