Budget battle starts today
Members of Parliament (MPs) reconvene today for the second meeting of the 46th Session to review the 2015/16 National Budget amid a worsening economic situation.
The Peter Mutharika administration is currently nursing a tanking economy, a pushover Malawi kwacha that is depreciating faster than ever; a high inflation rate that is eroding buying power and exacerbating poverty; expensive interest rates that have depressed consumption, slowed business activities and the economy in general.
Government is also struggling with a widening budget deficit, failure to raise sufficient funds to meet planned activities and has 2.8 million starving Malawians staring at it.
These are some of the difficult issues Finance, Economic Planning and Development Minister Goodall Gondwe is set to face difficult questions on and for which he will have to propose some equally tough, even politically difficult, prescriptions.
With the overall national budget set for brutal slashes in line with the realitie of a shrinking resource envelop, a Treasury source familiar with Gondwe’s thinking confided last week that the minister plans to announce ruthless cuts to the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (Fisp) and the travel budget, including the President’s.
During the four-week sitting, the 193 MPs are also expected to debate a number of bills, including the controversial Access to Information (ATI) following its approval by Cabinet on February 12 2016.
Leader of Government Business in Parliament Francis Kasaila said in an interview last week that some of the deliberations will involve presentations of ministerial statements on the current food situation and the country’s crumbling health service delivery.
Said Kasaila: “The sitting is about reviewing of the budget, but apart from that, we have a number of bills to deal with as well. There are about four carry-over bills from the last meeting and then we have between 11 and 13 new bills to be tabled in the National Assembly.”
He said the much-awaited ATI Bill was one of the several ready-for-parliamentary business with others being 10 land bills, which already got a nod from Cabinet.
According to Kasaila, ministers of Agriculture and Food Security Allan Chiyembekeza, Peter Kumpalume of Health and Henry Mussa of Labour, Youth and Manpower Development will also present statements on some steamy issues affecting the nation.
“We are expecting the Minister of Agriculture to present a statement on the food situation on Monday [today] where he will highlight the challenges the country is facing, how much food is currently available and what government is doing to address the challenges,” he said.
During last week’s two-day 5th All Inclusive Stakeholders Conference organised by the Public Affairs Committee (PAC), the issue of food shortage dominated the indaba with delegates questioning government’s persistent claims that the country has enough maize in Admarc depots to feed the hungry Malawians through to April.
During the conference, held under the theme Defining Solutions to Economic and Political Direction in Malawi, some delegates also urged parliamentarians to debate the food situation issue with seriousness and not to allow government to maintain its rhetoric at the expense of starving Malawians, but show action.
Executive director for Civil Society Agriculture Network (Cisanet) Tamani NKhono-Mvula said in food security, the availability of food did not matter; rather, it was its accessibility.
He said: “You can give us figures of who has maize and where that maize is, but as long as people cannot access it and are dying of hunger, that maize is useless, it is nothing. We can only clap hands that government is doing something if we see the maize in Admarcs.”
