‘Christmas’ at MEC: Commissioners to get K317m vehicles

Eight new Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) commissioners will get a K39.4 million (US$54,252)top-of-the-range Toyota Prado TX vehicle each, costing the taxpayer about K317.6 million barely a week after their predecessors took delivery of the old fleet.

Treasury spokesperson Nations Msowoya, in an interview yesterday, confirmed that government will buy the vehicles for the new commissioners.

He said: “Unless the terms and conditions [for MEC commissioners] are changed, the status quo remains the same. And yes, this is against the Minister of Finance’s wish to reduce expenditure.”

Under Article 4.2.2 of the revised Terms and Conditions of Service for the Commissioners of the Malawi Electoral Commission, the office bearers are entitled to purchase institutional vehicles allocated to them after five years of use or at the end of their contract; whichever may come first.

MEC acting spokesperson Richard Mveriwa also confirmed that the eight new  commissioners do not have official vehicles.

He said: “We are still using the same conditions of service drafted by Public Accounts Committee [PAC] of Parliament. Government will need to buy vehicles for these new commissioners. That is how it is in the conditions of service.”

The decision to buy the new commissioners vehicles comes barely a week after government gave the go-ahead to former commissioners to buy off the Toyota Prado TX vehicles they were using during their five-year term of office.

Initially, government, through Secretary to the Treasury Ronald Mangani, refused to grant the commissioners their request, saying the vehicles had not been used for more than five years and also that they had not been driven for at least 150 000 kilometres.

However, the decision to buy the new commissioners vehicles comes against a background of Gondwe’s newly-outlined plan to cut expenditure by at least 30 percent amid a dark fiscal outlook on the back of dwindling domestic revenue, budgetary support freeze and Cashgate-linked fleecing over the medium-term.

In an exclusive interview with The Nation at his office in Lilongwe last week Monday, Gondwe said he had commissioned an exercise to identify what he called “wasteful spending” areas.

Some of the areas which several analysts have identified as wastage of public expenditure have been a bloated civil service, unnecessary subsidies and an unmanageable vehicle fleet.

A 2012/13 assessment of the budget by Economics Association of Malawi (Ecama) found that government spent a whopping K17 billion servicing close to 3 000 vehicles, half of which was spent on fuel and maintenance and the remainder on allowances for drivers.

In 2013, the vehicles taken by former commissioners were bought at K19 million each duty-free. A source at Toyota Malawi said after a four-year period, the vehicles could have depreciated to K13 million each.

MEC has been riddled with debts and allegations of financial mismanagement which have seen some of its senior managers, including chief elections officer Willie Kalonga, sent on forced leave pending an investigation.

Two weeks ago, Treasury cleared outstanding debts worth about K1 billion which MEC owed suppliers of goods and services dating back to 2010.

When asked economist Ben Kalua said Malawi is not demonstrating signs of a poor country as there’s an influx demand of big vehicles.

“Going forwad such contracts must not be entertained at all. As a poor country we are not being realistic, everybody wants to drive big cars, I mean maintainance and disposal wise is costly. Even for the economy, as a country we can not sustain such a living standard, the long end of this is simply to end such contracts,” he said.