Former President Joyce Banda has said she intends to tithe her pension arrears from 2016 to the Synod of Livingstonia when government pays her.<\/p>\n
Banda, who announced in a church service at St Andrews in Mzuzu that her 2017 pension was paid already, thanked the church for their prayers and encouragement when she was away.<\/p>\n
She told the congregation that, once she receives her 2016 arrears, she will surrender K1 million to the synod account and K300, 000 to Women\u2019s Guild account.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can tell you that government started paying me my monthly retirement benefits last year. I cannot hide you because it is in the books. We get K1.1 million, therefore I tithed part of the 2017 payment to my church at home in Zomba. Now I promise that my 2016 tithe will be surrendered to Livingstonia Synod,\u201d Banda said<\/p>\n
Banda returned home last week to a rousing welcome by her supporters and vowed to prove her innocence.<\/p>\n
After spending more than three years in self-imposed exile because of graft allegations, Malawi\u2019s first female president returned as police said her warrant of arrest issued last July was still valid.<\/p>\n
Last year, police issued an arrest warrant against Banda, saying her alleged offences were part of Cashgate. But early this year, the Anti-Corruption Bureau said it had no solid evidence against her, Banda is accused of cashgate, a corruption scandal in which senior government officials siphoned millions of dollars from state coffers, which was uncovered in 2013, while she was president.<\/p>\n
She lost elections to Peter Mutharika a year later and immediately faced allegations of abuse of office and money laundering, which she denied and left the country.<\/p>\n
A former justice minister and attorney general were convicted over Cashgate, along with a number of former high-ranking government officials and business people.<\/p>\n
Banda has been living in the United States, serving as a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Center for Global Development in Washington DC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former President Joyce Banda has said she intends to tithe her pension arrears from 2016 to the Synod of Livingstonia when government pays her. Banda, who announced in a church service at St Andrews in Mzuzu that her 2017 pension was paid already, thanked the church for their prayers and encouragement when she was away. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":13136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65008","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\/65008","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=65008"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65009,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65008\/revisions\/65009"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}