The parliamentary Legal Affairs, Privileges and Public Appointments cluster Wednesday pressed officials from the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC) to explain why unforeseen activities became a challenge that partly crippled operations of the office in the current financial year.<\/p>\n
Making a presentation on performance of the OPC\u2019s current budget and the outline for the next fiscal year, Principal Secretary responsible for Administration, Cliff Chiunda, said the office spent funds on the Bingu National Stadium stampede, the Area 18 water contamination saga and the funeral of the wife of former opposition leader Gwanda Chakuamba, among other activities.<\/p>\n
\u201cOPC budget has for a number of [times] been financing unforeseen activities [that are] not budgeted [for], therefore making it difficult to implement its core activities,\u201d Chiunda said.<\/p>\n
This, however, surprised Members of Parliament (MPs)in the cluster, who pointed out that the Unforeseen Expenditure Vote in the current financial year was revised to K11.8 billion from K1.8 billion, a development which should have been necessitated by crises.<\/p>\n
The cluster\u2019s co-Chairperson Lingson Belekanyama, MP for Ntchisi North, Boniface Kadzamira, and MP for Lilongwe Mpenu, Nkhoma Collins Kajawa, pressed both the OPC and Treasury officials to explain how the funds for unforeseen activities were being utilised.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere does the Unforeseen Expenditure Vote belong? Is it OPC? During the mid-term budget review meeting, we approved K11.8 billion for this vote and my understanding is that the mentioned unforeseen problems were supposed to be addressed using this vote,\u201d Belekanyama said.<\/p>\n
Kadzamira also asked Chiunda why, in the first place, the OPC was involved in funding various interventions to address challenges after the crises.<\/p>\n
In response, Chiunda said they work on directives, adding that, since the responses were for emergencies, they could not wait for the Treasury to fund them through the Unforeseen Expenditure Vote, which is under the Ministry of Finance, Economic Planning and Development.<\/p>\n
Officials from the Treasury who appeared before the cluster together with OPC officials claimed that the funds which OPC had used to respond to the emergencies had been reimbursed as they had not initially been budgeted for.<\/p>\n
This raised more questions from the lawmakers, who wondered why OPC had indicated that the activities had exerted pressure on its budget.<\/p>\n
Kajawa told the OPC officials: \u201cThe funds\u2014we don\u2019t know how much we are talking about here\u2014 were reimbursed. Then you go ahead to say, due to the unbudgeted for funding, you failed to undertake some activities.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response, Comptroller of Statutory Corporations, Stuart Ligomeka, argued that, normally, the unforeseen activities happen when the Treasury does not have money.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the same time, it may happen when they have already funded a ministry, like in our case, but they [the Treasury] don\u2019t have cash at that material time. When you look at the urgency of the issue, you have to come in without waiting for the Treasury to release funds from the Unforeseen Expenditure Vote,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In an interview after the meeting, Belekanyama said, despite appreciating the explanations from the OPC and Treasury officials, there were some areas that should have been clarified.<\/p>\n
According to Chiunda, in the 2018\/19 national budget, OPC has been allocated K6.4 billion, a \u2018moderate\u2019 rise from the K5.32 that the office was allocated in the 2017\/18 plan after revision of the budget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The parliamentary Legal Affairs, Privileges and Public Appointments cluster Wednesday pressed officials from the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC) to explain why unforeseen activities became a challenge that partly crippled operations of the office in the current financial year. Making a presentation on performance of the OPC\u2019s current budget and the outline for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":27792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66119","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\/66119","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=66119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66123,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66119\/revisions\/66123"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}