Any remedies for CDF?

Will Constituency Development Fund (CDF) ever be effective? Malawians should be pardoned for thinking: “Why should we care”.

In 2012, the prevalent public response to a comprehensive audit that revealed “serious abuses” of CDF was anger towards members of Parliament and district councils—not analysis.

Yet, anger is not enough to get the country over the continued abuse of public funds.

The explanations that have been given so far are comforting yet familiar. Some say the MPs should be removed from being a key player in CDF implementation. Others say CDF should be abolished and let Local Development Fund (LDF) do the rest. And so on.

But removing MPs would not bring the desired results because even officials at the district councils have, audit reports have shown, also been involved in CDF malpractice.

In fact, even abolishing CDF may not be an option; CDF has managed to make a difference in countries such as Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

To mean, there must be something bigger at work here—something responsible for the failure of CDF in Malawi.

For Dr Asiyati Chiweza, senior lecture of local government at Chancellor College, the answer lies in the structure of local governance in the country.

“Malawi adopted devolution or democratic decentralisation as the strategy for implementing its decentralisation policy reforms seen as a logical conclusion to the transition to democracy since May 1994.

“The decentralisation policy reforms, hence, were intended to concretise the realisation of democratic local governments provided for in article 146 of the Constitution,” she says.

She adds that the ultimate objective of the current decentralisation policy reforms is “to institutionalise real decision making powers and authority in local jurisdictions with clear geographical boundaries, legal status and personnel of their own, to such extent that a great bulk of their activities are outside the direct control of the central government.”

“The local government is, therefore, no longer a public body exercising delegated powers but rather a deliberative assembly with legislative and executive powers recognised and embedded in the constitution,” she says.

But what does local government has to do with effectiveness of CDF?

Policy and development specialist Blessings Chinsinga argues that there is no question that the cause of the CDF sounds noble but its architecture and the circumstances under which it was introduced raise more questions than answers.

“The tenure of local governments that were constituted following the 2 000 local government elections expired four years ago yet the date for the next elections remained unknown.

“The architecture of the CDF risks rendering the entire decentralisation project redundant especially if one considers the intense acrimonious relationships that prevailed amongst the key local power elites, namely: chiefs, councillors, and MPs within the framework of local governance between 2000 and 2005.

“The strained relations among the key local stakeholders revolve around the two key issues: 1) who is the legitimate authority to represent the grassroots; and 2) the apparent lack of clarity of the functions and responsibilities of these key actors in local governance processes,” he says.

CDF, as such, has been the suffering grass being trampled by the three fighting giants.

In fact, as Chiweza argues, the greatest drawback to effective implementation of CDF has been the careful suppression of the councillors’ hand both by the executive and the legislature.

“There haven’t been local polls since 2005. Government has been giving a lot of excuses. But this has greatly affected CDF because it was being used without an oversight hand of the councillors. This could explain rampant abuse,” she says.

She adds that even government’s move to continue having a situation where councillors are not being paid is a ploy to keep them weak and demotivated.

Beyond that, Chiweza adds that the conflict of control between MPs and councillors at the district councils, led MPs, in 2010, to effect a change to the Local Government Act.

“MPs gave themselves power to be voting—something they did not have before. All this was done to make sure that they have a stake at whatever is happening at the politics of local government.

“However, increasing the powers of MPs at the local politics is detrimental to local governance. It means, councillors will not have the power to make critical decisions because MPs will override them,” she says.

Chinsinga, further notes that it is observed that CDFs were a hurriedly put together initiative in most of these countries. Consequently CDFs are grappling with extensive legal, administrative, political and administrative challenges.

In Tanzania, for instance, the CDF was introduced in the 2007/08 budget without any guidelines or procedures to regulate its implementation and in Uganda the Clerk of Parliament released CDF allocations into the MPs’ personal accounts in November 2005 almost mid way into the fiscal year and less than three months before the presidential and parliamentary elections.

“Except in Kenya, CDFs do not have any legal basis; they are merely an outcome of parliamentary administrative decisions,” says Chinsinga.

As such, he proposes the need for putting in place mechanisms for transparency and accountability which are currently absent.

He adds that institutions for decision making are weak and again there are design problems particularly with regard to insufficient technical staff with necessary skills to assist communities in preparing and implementing projects.

Beyond that Chinsinga notes that lack of adequate community participation in project selection, execution, selection of committees, and monitoring and evaluation need also to be address.

“There limited awareness of the CDFs among constituents; and again confusion as to whether CDFs should be merged with other funds or not and controlled by the MPs or councillors is also something that needs to be addressed,” he said.