Proof of the pudding is in the eating

My main interest in the 2022/23 national budget is how the money in the national resource envelope will be protected from the hungry vultures with their fangs bared on the money.

In 2002, the then director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Fahad Asani said a third of the national budget is washed down the river. Not by the likes of Cyclone Ana or before it Cyclone Idai, but by the many selfish and heartless wolves in sheep’s clothing who purportedly sit sentry to the public resources while salivating over it.

Asani’s assertion was as true then as it is now. Almost two decades later, a third of the national resource envelope still ends up in people’s bank accounts and pockets of people unconcerned with the plight of poor Malawians who need drugs when they fall sick. The same way a third of the drugs budget or the drugs meant for use in public hospitals are stolen. To a very large extent, the purported fight against corruption is symbolic and cosmetic.

I like chief Sitola from Machinga who, during an Anti-Corruption Day commemoration about six or so years ago, told government officials they are wasting poor people’s time in the villages sermonising to them about corruption when the vice is actually domiciled at Capital Hill and in big government offices. Who in Nthalire in Chitipa or at Mbang’ombe in Lilongwe or Khwisa in Balaka writes payment vouchers or signs government cheques worth billions of kwacha? This is the work of public officers sitting in air conditioned offices in the Capital City. Those are the people that steal money meant for roads, for buying educational materials and for building classroom blocks. But here was the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) busy evangelizing to villagers in a remote village on an issue that did not concern them.

Yes, corruption is evil and anyone found practicing the vice should be reported to police to face the law. Better still may lightening strike them dead before the next Cyclone is on our doorsteps.

The message from the Machinga chief was that government has many of its priorities upside down. Government spends billions of taxpayer revenue doing literally nothing. Kenyan motivational speaker Professor Patrick Lock Otieno Lumumba is spot on when he says African governments deliberately put hyenas to guard over goats and when the goats are consumed they pretend to wonder why.

When government allocates huge amounts of money as it did in the 2021/22 national budget (K142 billion) to a single sector, the Affordable Inputs Programme (AIP), without ring-fencing such resources, there we have put hyenas to watch over our goats.

So, as the Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs Sosten Gwengwe presented his maiden budget for the 2022/23 fiscus, my interest was what plugs he put to seal the loop holes. How much did he allocate to graft-busting institutions such the ACB, the Financial Intelligence Agency, the Malawi Human Rights Commission, the Judiciary, the Office of the Ombudsman, among others? In the last budget we noticed a marked improvement on the allocation to most of these public departments. That was a good beginning. My hope is that there will be an improvement in the current budget.

While allocation of huge amounts of money to all these organisations is a good beginning in the fight against corruption, it does not guarantee victory against the vice. Equally important is political will. The undoing for the good funding to ACB in the last budget were the treacherous activities that surrounded the graft-busting body’s director general Martha Chizuma aimed at flooring her. She was wrong-footed by those who felt she would expose their dirty schemes. This is like giving with one hand and taking away with the other. It is massaging corruption. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And so like all other budgets, before it the real worth and success, or effectiveness of the 2022/23 fiscal plan will not be determined by the amounts of allocations to each sector but how much political will the Tonse Alliance administration will invest in each allocation.