Government has committed to completing construction of health facilities which stalled for a long time in order to improve access to health services among the rural communities.<\/p>\n
Minister of Health Peter Kumpalume made the remarks on Sunday when he re-launched construction of Zomba Chisi Hospital which started in 2012 and was abandoned by the contractor due to lack of funding by government.<\/p>\n
Kumpalume said government is concerned that a lot of taxpayers\u2019 money has remained idle in projects that have taken long.<\/p>\n
However, the minister indicated that government has devised a mechanism to use in mobilising resources to finish these projects.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t want these projects to be white elephants. We want people to start benefiting from these projects because it is their money and we cannot allow the money to be wasted in ghost projects,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He revealed that there are 15 health facilities whose progress was stalled by lack of funds. Out of them, government indicates that it is ready to resume construction of eight facilities before the end of this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll these projects were [stalled] as a result of Cashgate. Seven of them cannot be resumed because their issues are in court and need some legal solutions before government allocates funds. But what we should emphasise is that money is available to finance these projects,\u201d Kumpalume said.<\/p>\n
Commenting on the K400 million Zomba Chisi Hospital, Kumpalume said the facility is timely to the people of Chisi who are travelling over 30 kilometres to access health services.<\/p>\n
Member of Parliament for the area Mark Botomani advised the people against stealing construction materials in order to avoid frustrating progress of the project.<\/p>\n
He advised the chiefs in the area to provide necessary support to the contractor. He also urged the people in the area to refrain from politicising the project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Government has committed to completing construction of health facilities which stalled for a long time in order to improve access to health services among the rural communities. Minister of Health Peter Kumpalume made the remarks on Sunday when he re-launched construction of Zomba Chisi Hospital which started in 2012 and was abandoned by the contractor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":45551,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45552,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45547\/revisions\/45552"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}