Vice President Saulosi Chilima has directed the Blantyre City Council (BCC) officials to vacate a court injunction which was obtained by some owners of the buildings in Limbe Township stopping the council to implement its Red Star campaign.

In 2015, the council rolled out a campaign dubbed ‘Red Star’ with the aim of demolishing all the substandard structures that were marked with a red cross.

But in 2016, about 50 owners of the targeted buildings obtained an injunction from the court.

During his Quarterly Reforms Progress Review meeting with officials from BCC at Civic Centre Offices, Chilima said the campaign must be implemented.

Chilima said: “If there are injunctions then people should go to court and do the needful so that those buildings must be demolished and the new structures erected instead.”

“I hope that the city council will take it up and if they don’t, then we will see by the time when we come back for the next review but that Red Star campaign must carry on.”

BCC Acting Chief Executive Officer, Coxly Chanza, declined to comment much on the matter saying the issue is still in court.

However Chanza said there are some developments being done to ensure that the initiative of re-building the city still stands.

“We still have some developers that are submitting their development plans to the council to come up with new buildings and we are supporting them,” he said.

Apart from holding meetings with the councils, the Vice President also visited a number of development projects in the city including a bridge which links Sunnyside and Namiwawa which usually submerge during rainy season due to what he described as “faulty design.”

He therefore said the consultant engineers who were responsible for the work on the bridge must redo the mistake because they were already paid.