APM hailed for OPC reshuffle

President Peter Mutharika over the weekend detached certain functions from the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC) and relocated them to their relevant line ministries, a move highly saluted by some governance experts.

The Civil Service Reform Commission (CSRC), chaired by Vice-President Saulos Chilima, said in a statement on Saturday the President had directed restructuring of the OPC so that it reverts to its primary business of administering the public service and Cabinet affairs.

The President has detached from the OPC four initiatives which were created by his predecessors and moved them to other ministries such as Health, Agriculture and Home Affairs in his pursuit to ensure efficiency and effectiveness of the civil service.

The affected programmes include the Department of HIV and Aids and Nutrition and the Safe Motherhood Initiative which have been moved to the Ministry of Health; the Presidential Initiative on Poverty and Hunger Reduction which has been moved to the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development.

Others are the National Registration Bureau, which is responsible for the National Identity Project, which is now under the Ministry of Home Affairs while the Government Contracting Unit has gone to the Office of the Director of Public Procurement (ODPP).

Commenting on the developments, Henry Chingaipe, a governance and development expert, applauded Mutharika describing the move as “long overdue” because OPC accumulated functions that it should not have.

Said Chingaipe: “What the President is doing, in my view, is normalising of the situation. If you look at all those initiatives they clearly fall within mandates of other ministries. So, over the years the OPC accumulated functions which should have been left to be done by other relevant ministries.”

He said these initiatives were created by former presidents to either highlight the political importance of those aspects of government service and were also used to recruit “relatives and friends”.

According to Chilima, government has also banned chief executive officers (CEOs) of parastatals, principal secretaries (PSs) and other senior public officers from attending public or presidential functions unless “the functions or events pertain to their organisations” so that they spend more time attending to their core functions.

The statement further said government will recognise the senior officers through their performance and not by the number of public events they attend.

Women civil servants have also been banned from dancing at public functions unless they “directly relate to their profession or organisation” or are about commemorating an anniversary or celebration of national or international significance.

The President appointed the CSRC soon after taking over government and its members include prominent businessperson Thom Mpinganjira, former Director of Public Procurement Bright Mangulama and lawyer and women rights’ activist Seodi White. Other members are barrister-at-law Krishna Savjan, SC, Institute of Chartered Accountants in Malawi (Icam) chief executive officer Evelyn Mwapasa and the Reverend Howard Matiya Nkhoma, and former general secretary of the CCAP Synod of Livingstonia.