It appears the rain of economic misery on Malawi is now at full pelt if revelations that government has already depleted K1.1 billion meant for compensations in the 2012/13 fiscal year are anything to go by.
Despite overspending by K500 million so far, government is also expected to pay K7 billion in compensation for breach of contracts and human rights violations resulting from unlawful arrests.
This amount, which excludes millions government agreed to pay public officers that the Joyce Banda administration fired, is the money we can ill-afford to dispense in our pitiable economic state.
Failure has so many fathers, so they say. An insatiable urge to purge the system of perceived sympathisers of the former regime, lack of proper exit procedures and failure to respect people’s contracts have led to so many claims.
We cannot apportion the blame on victims of the system for their claims as they deserve to be compensated.
We, however, ask government to put in place proper mechanisms to avoid paying needless compensations. Firing public officers with impunity for no proper reasons will end up impoverishing the country further.
It is high time government stopped burdening the already heavily-taxed taxpayer with unnecessary compensations instead of providing them with better services.
