Off the Shelf

A sanctuary for suspects, lawbreakers

There has been much talk about the K4 billion Gondwe-Nakhumwa selected Constituency Development Fund (CDF) projects. The money was initially given to 86 members of Parliament who voted against the Electoral Reform Bills (ERF).

When the issue was exposed, the Executive decided that all MPs should share the loot. This initially seemed to be OK with all MPs. But Malawi Congress Party (MCP) MPs later developed cold feet and said they will have none of it as they said it was blood money.

There is damning information from a document I have seen that this money was accumulated from deductions from the Midyear Revised Budget for the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development. It shows that the Midyear Revised Budget for councils was further cut by K4.15 billion or14 percent.

A senior government official who showed me the document bitterly complains that as a result of these deductions, the ministry cannot run hospitals properly. It also cannot drill boreholes or rehabilitate city roads.

According to the document, the biggest casualty are the city roads projects whose revised budgets were ripped off by a whopping K3 billion. If councils are unable to maintain or upgrade city roads, it is because someone is using the money to massage their political egos.

The cut from the vote for the Development of Boreholes accounted for K756 480 000, while the deductions from hospitals were K398 981 870. These are the same hospitals which lose 30 percent of drugs through pilferage. They (hospitals) cannot employ new nurses or other health cadres because they are underfunded. It smacks of hypocrisy that the cuts are made from institutions which are always inundated with the ever-increasing number of patients seeking treatment.

With our hospitals already running on shoe-string budgets, it is sad that after the Midyear Revised Budgets someone could still have the nerve to further chop off their budgets for political handshakes. What all these cuts mean is an early dispatch of thousands of people to the grave.

The document shows that the councils’ Revised Budgets which have been cut by 40 percent have further been sliced by a further five percent to beef up CDF.

It is no wonder that with the small budget for public hospitals this year, cholera has claimed the lives of 28 people and registered over 880 cases. These are record figures.

The behaviour of officials entrusted to oversee and manage our moneys leaves a lot to be desired. Ambulances cannot promptly ferry patients to hospitals because the councils do not have enough fuel, or the vehicles cannot be maintained.

To ask government to improve on its public finance management system is to say the obvious. What those entrusted with our finances are showing is arrogance. They don’t seem to care because they know they will get away with it. It is impunity of the highest order.

We should all be concerned that the money chopped off from hospitals budget, borehole and city roads projects is allocated to the CDF. This is the same facility which MPs are known to abuse with abandon. Several months after it was disclosed that some greedy MPs helped themselves with the people’s money, none is yet to see the full wrath of the law. To escape from getting prosecuted, some have simply joined the ruling party. People who ought to be serving jail time are hiding in the armpits of the Democratic Progressive Party. The DPP leadership should be wary that it is being turned into a sanctuary for thieves.

No wonder, after many years of talk about efforts to improve the public finance management, donors still look at the national budget as a leaking budget. They think that all the noise about efforts to seal the leaking bucket is mere window dressing. As a result, they have chosen to channel their aid through other avenues.

Unfortunately, these channels have also proven to be equally ineffective in getting the masses benefit from the aid.

Against all this malfeasance, impunity and window dressing, one is compelled to conclude that CSOs are 100 percent justified to hold nationwide demonstrations. Maybe this will shake up the duty bearers a little and show them that people are angry.

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