Taxpayers are set to dig deeper to pay for the Malawi Government’s recourse to deploy on secondment several chief executive officers of State agencies to public universities as lecturers amid austerity measures.
The secondments mean that their positions will have to be filled in acting capacity by officers who will be getting almost the same package, a situation which pundits say runs counter to the Peter Mutharika administration’s recently announced austerity measures.
The Malawi Public Service Regulations (MPSR) also place the burden on receiving institutions, in this case, the public universities to be reimbursing the perks, thereby overburdening these training institutions.
In separate interviews, experts agreed that the secondments are political in nature and will hurt the common man who will have to pay through the nose, although government says the decision was productive.
A human resource management expert who recently retired from civil service but asked not to be named in order to speak candidly, said as per the MPSR 1:174 (3), the institutions where the CEOs have been sent will be responsible for paying back all the perks in full to originating parastatals.
In an interview yesterday, Civil Society Education Coalition executive director Benedicto Kondowe said deployment of CEOs with no background in the academia undermines standards and distorts human-resource planning.
He said the tendency creates an impression that public universities were being turned into holding spaces and raises questions of fairness and merit, especially when individuals retain perks unrelated to academic work.
“Secondments must only occur where the recipient institution can accommodate the officer within its normal pay structure,” said Kondowe.
Mzuzu University (Mzuni) economics lecturer Christopher Mbukwa and accountability expert Willy Kambwandira agreed, saying, one has to meet the qualifications of a lecturer because not every CEO can be an academic.
Kambwandira argued that the situation is creating a perverse precedent where public universities have become dumping ground for expensive executives while real academic needs go unfunded.
For Mbukwa, the secondments constitute a waste of resources because two people will be paid on the same post.
He said: “Notwithstanding the lawsuits that will ensue from these secondments because some are not willing to be seconded. They would rather have their contracts terminated and be paid their dues.
“Only when there are glaring abuses, incompetence and ineffective [performance] that’s when a contract should be terminated. Otherwise, most of the secondments are more political than technical. We are likely to waste a lot of resources in the process.”
From the governance front, George Chaima said it will be demoralising and an insult to ordinary lecturers seeing these CEOs going to work in expensive vehicles and earning several times more than them.
Our sources indicated yesterday that the CEOs get between K10 million and K15 million, including benefits like fuel and hefty fees for their children.
While he did not respond to our questions yesterday, Chief Secretary to the Government Justin Saidi told The Nation on Monday that some of the redeployments were a result of underperformance while others are going to the public universities as “role models”.
“These people will be role models to students. They have worked for water boards for a long time. We want hands on experience,” he said.
To date, CEOs for Central Region Water Board, Blantyre Water Board, Southern Region Water Board and Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) have been deployed to Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences.
On the other hand, Northern Region Water Board CEO alongside Electricity Generation Company (Egenco) CEOs and Escom chief operating officer are heading to Mzuzu University (Mzuni) as lecturers.
