Government U-turns on K58bn arms deals
Months after announcing that the Malawi Gvernment was cancelling K58 billion (US$128.9 million) worth of Malawi Defence Force contracts with South African military supplier Paramount Group, President Peter Mutharika’s administration has swallowed its pride and is now set to renegotiate the deal, Nation on Sunday can reveal.
The controversial military deals, which included the purchase of patrol boats in 2013, among other classified procurements, were ordered under the presidency of Joyce Banda.
Shortly after Mutharika defeated Banda in May 2014, his Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe announced that Lilongwe would be cancelling some of the contracts worth over $145 million (about K58 billion).
But both the Attorney General (AG) Kalekeni Kaphale and Ministry of Finance spokesperson Nations Msowoya confirmed in separate interviews in the week that government has revisited the issue.
“We are re-negotiating the deals instead of cancelling. We reviewed the contracts and discovered that all were properly drafted according to our laws. We will just renegotiate some of the contracts,” said Kaphale, but for security reasons, said he could not disclose the actual arms deals under renegotiation.
On his part, Msowoya asked for more time to find out the total cost of the contracts to be renegotiated.
Gondwe, who last September announced that the deal between Malawi and the South African firm had been halted, asked for more time to respond to the matter.
However, sources have told Nation on Sunday that government has been engaging the arms supplier on the matter.
“The agreement between the Malawi Government and Paramount Group has been abrogated. That is all I can confirm and say,” Gondwe told our sister newspaper Weekend Nation then while sources told the paper that the administration found the deal contracts “expensive and illegal”.
When government cancelled the deal, Paramount Group released a statement, describing the termination of the contracts as untrue, but government insisted such a decision was indeed made.
Under the contracts, Malawi was supposed to pay the supplier $5 million (K2 billion) quarterly.
