By Deogratias Mmana:
The Malawi Local Government Association (Malga) has said the outgoing cadre of members of Parliament and ward councillors has failed to deliver as expected and asked voters to vote wisely in the forthcoming general elections.
In an exclusive interview, Malga Executive Director Hadrod Mkandawire said the legislators let down the local government sector.
“For this outgoing Parliament cohort, it has not sufficiently met the expectations of the Local Government sector. This Parliament has set a record of legislative threshold of unprecedented proportions.
“This is a Parliament that has legislated and enacted laws on unprecedented scale. Where the government was delaying in bringing bills to Parliament, we witnessed Members of Parliament rising to the occasion to table Private Members Bills.
“However, the same enthusiasm, zeal and interest eluded the local government sector. You may wish to know that the Local government amendment Bill has dragged since 2021. Much as the government is primarily accountable for this, we expected the Parliamentarians to rise up to the occasion as they did on Corrupt Practices Act amendment Bill, Forest Act amendment Bill amongst others,” Mkandawire said.
He added that the outgoing legislators “blatantly refused to heed our call” to amend the Taxation Act to waive duty on one vehicle for ward councillors in five years to facilitate effective discharging of their duties.
However, he said the MPs meaningfully held the central government accountable on the government’s cautious approach to meaningful fiscal devolution.
Turning to councillors, he said the outgoing cohort is a mixed bag.
“There are some councils where the members of the council have been able to effectively discharge their Constitutional and legislative mandate, namely oversight role, legislative role and representation role.
“”However, we have had regrettable scenarios in some councils where councillors have abandoned their mandate and focussed on personal convenience matters.
“In addition, there has been no meaningful capacity support to councillors to enable them effectively discharge their roles,” Mkandawire said.
He also faulted what he called “too much powers” given to the MPs over the administration of the Constituency Development Funded.
“This dilutes CDF as a local development fund window because any local development window is supposed to follow core principles of devolution. This is the very reason we have been calling for collapsing of all funding windows meant for local development into one basket modelled under District Development Fund/ Infrastructure Development Fund,” he said.
He also trashed the CDF bursary fund arguing that it is a misplaced scheme.
“The bursary scheme under CDF is a misplaced intervention. From the beginning, we have had problems with this arrangement. We are failing to comprehend how a bursary scheme would fall under a development window which essentially is expected to be infrastructure development fund in nature.
“Bursary by its nature is a social welfare intervention. It therefore, follows that any government-funded bursary scheme is supposed to be anchored and managed by the social welfare office under the newly created directorate of social services in Local Government Authorities,” Mkandawire said.
As the country heads to the polls, Mkandawire asked Malawians to make a decision.
“Let each individual candidate be subjected to scrutiny by their respective voters, and, if the voters as rights holders would be of the view the incumbent has failed the test based on the previous term, let them make a decision,” he said.
Parliament met for the last time last week, until the country elections in September.
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