No further delays for council salaries— Government

The recent devolution of payrolls in some key sectors of health, education and agriculture is said to improve salary processing at the council level.

Government commenced the exercise in January this year following delays that characterised payment of salaries to councils.

According to Principal Secretary for Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, Kiswell Dakamau, so far, six server sites have been created where salaries for council staff will be prepared.

The server sites are in Mulanje, Blantyre, Zomba, Lilongwe Kasungu and Mzuzu.

One server site is currently serving an average of five councils.

According to Dakamau, the aim of the devolution is for the councils to manage its own staff.

This means council management will be in a position to recruit, promote and discipline respective employees.

“As a process to achieve that, one aspect or component is to devolve the salaries so that individual councils should be managing salaries for its employees. We also rolled the process of configuring accounts at the Accountant General’s department so that each and every council should have a separate component in the budget that would receive the salaries,” he said.

The devolution follows a delay in salary disbursement in the month of January 2017 for staff working in all councils across the country.

This happened as the councils had failed to process their employees’ salaries after the ministry moved the payroll to councils as part of the decentralisation process.

The new processing of salaries comes after the adoption of the 1998 National Decentralisation Policy and passing of the Local Government Act.

Meanwhile, Dakamau said the server sites will be created in all councils in the county depending on the availability of funds.

“That will depend on funds availability from the government because it is a very expensive adventure.” he said.

The Principal Secretary also said that with the new payroll structure, government will no longer be held accountable for delays in salaries but rather individual councils.