“I am advising honourable members for the time being not to attend council meetings,” said Local Government and Rural Development Minister Ben Phiri in a November 10 2025 ministerial statement on the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) and other administrative arrangements in local authorities.
In that statement in Parliament, Phiri also said: “The chairperson of the ADC [Area Development Committee] will be responsible, for the time being, for filling out project identification forms, which will be submitted to their respective district commissioners and interviews with some MPs yesterday that the legislators have quietly formed a taskforce to draft Bills aimed at, among others, re-inserting legislators into council chambers and CDF operations despite a High Court ruling delivered in May this year kicking them out.
The legislators’ latest manoeuvring through fresh Bills comes with apparent tacit support from the same Peter Mutharika administration, which said it would respect the High Court ruling that booted MPs out of CDF and from being members of councils.
The DPP has a history of trying to undermine the role of councillors in development initiatives within local governments.
In 2010, during the Bingu wa Mutharika administration, it was the DPP-led government that introduced the law elevating the role of MPs in local councils’ development agenda.
The idea at the time was to give parliamentarians an advantage over councillors who the nervous MPs feared would overshadow them in local-level development projects that have direct impact on voters.
Now back in power, the DPP— in an alliance of convenience with legislators from both sides of the aisle just for the CDF project—has picked up its 15-year playbook to recast an arrangement that the High Court nullified, ruling that Section 5.1b of
the Local Government Act, which brings MPs into the council, is unconstitutional because it violates the doctrine of separation of powers.
Mzimba South MP, Emmanuel Chambulanyina Jere (Malawi Congress Party)— who last week successfully moved a motion in Parliament to introduce Bills that will provide for an appropriate legal framework for managing CDF—was clear that MPs must be part of the CDF structure.
In an interview, Jere said the High Court ruling did not state that MPs should be removed from any role pertaining to CDF. Rather, he claimed, the court said guidelines in managing CDF and the Constitution were not talking to each other.
Argued Jere: “It was only the right to vote at council, which the court outlawed, not involvement in CDF. That ruling, therefore, gave us a mandate to look at the law so that what is being done is in tandem with the Constitution; hence, the Bills.
“Remember that CDF was meant for constituencies, which are managed by MPs and not councillors. Wait for the Bills to come, maybe by the end of this week and we will debate on what is contained in such Bills. We have a team looking into the Bills.”
Another MP, who sought anonymity and is part of the bi-partisan task force of legislators crafting the Bills, said it would be naïve to leave the CDF to councillors.
“We cannot let councillors manage CDF, that cannot happen,” said the MP, who noted that the Mutharika administration has raised CDF to K5 billion per constituency effective April 1 next year from K220 million currently.
But reac t i ng to the machinations, Malawi Local Government Association (Malga) executive director Hadrod Mkandawire, who said they have had several engagements with Minister Phiri on this matter, charged that taking out councillors is a mistake.
“There is no way any funding can be managed at the council level without the oversight and monitoring of councillors. Councillors are the fiduciary owners of the councils on behalf of the people who elect them. They will surely provide oversight.
“However, I should emphasize here that any intentions, whether legislative or otherwise, that expressly and or impliedly seek to undermine the High Court decision, will be challenged. This I can assure Malawians,” he warned.
Meanwhile, accountability and governance institutions have warned government against any attempt to re-insert MPs either directly or indirectly into CDF, saying it will be against rule of law given the recent High Court ruling.
They are worried with the upcoming Bills that MPs we talked to said would be brought to Parliament through private members. Governance observers are also worried by sentiments from the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, fearing that his “for the time being” speech means that MPs could revert to their roles in CDF.
Centre for Social Transparency and Accountability executive director Willy Kambwandira, whose institution has been following up on CDF implementation, said he has serious reservations with the government’s response to the court ruling.
While Phiri said MPs had been removed from certain direct control of CDF, Kambwandira said the minister’s insistence on ‘for the time being’ and on reconstituted ADC and Village Development Committees (VDCs) where MPs may still play a role, suggests a hedged commitment.
Said Kambwandira: “The exclusion of councillors from project submission is particularly troubling as it risks sidelining local governance actors and concentrating powers in DCs or ADC chairpersons.
“By framing the changes as temporary, the government may be preserving a backdoor to reassert MPs’ influence later. We know that with new Bills, MPs are trying to re-legitimise their involvement in CDF through legislation.”
He accused MPs of trying to craft a legal pathway that keeps them influential without directly breaching separation of powers.
“We should expect reforms that look like compliance, but preserve political control over where and how CDF money flows. But as civil society, we will not sit down and watch, we will challenge any legislation that keeps MPs close to CDF,” he said.
Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation (CHRR) executive director Michael Kaiyatsa said any attempt to re-insert MPs into decision-making spaces through indirect channels risks undermining both the spirit and the letter of the court ruling.
“Even though the CDF is a decentralised fund, the political incentive to control project identification and resource allocation is high. That is why we continue to see insistence on an MP’s role, even when the courts have ruled otherwise.
“It is likely that government is contemplating legislative amendments to redefine or reintroduce MPs’ roles in the CDF through statute, especially given the Minister’s repeated use of the term ‘for the time being’.”
Minister Phiri did not respond to our questions yesterday.
