Members of Parliament (MPs) Friday passed the 2018\/2019 budget which is now pegged at K1.455 trillion.<\/p>\n
The budget was passed after Minister of Finance, Economic Planning and Development, Goodall Gondwe, was forced to change an allocation to the National Assembly from K13.9 billion to K14.6 billion.<\/p>\n
The change is expected to accommodate salary increments, one of the demands the legislators have been making since Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have made changes to this vote to allow increases in emoluments,” Gondwe said when moving a motion to the MPs to accept the allocation.<\/p>\n
There was no comment from the MPs as was the case with most votes. The silence was followed by a loud ‘aye’ after First Deputy Speaker Esther Mcheka Chilenje posed a question to the MPs to either accept or reject the allocation.<\/p>\n
Leader of Opposition in Parliament, Lazarus Chakwera, hailed the role opposition MPs played in the scrutiny of the budget.<\/p>\n
“I am happy that Malawians now have a budget. As opposition, we have done our due diligence in scrutinising the budget. However, if we were the ones presenting the budget it could have been a better one,” Chakwera said.<\/p>\n
Leader of the House, Kondwani Nankhumwa, has said the House has more business to transact before it rises next week.<\/p>\n
“Now that the budget has been passed, we are remaining with Appropriation Bill. There is also more business to transact,” Nankhumwa said.<\/p>\n
It was a day the MPs were expected to pass 14 votes. But from the onset, it was clear that yielding to their demands was a condition for passing the budget.<\/p>\n
Chairperson of the Welfare Committee of Parliament, Alex Major, stood on a point of order and requested the suspension of the proceedings considering that their demands had not yet been met.<\/p>\n
The statements were echoed by Kasungu North East MP Elias Wakuda Kamanga who said the legislators were being taken for granted.<\/p>\n
It was only after a meeting of the leadership of the House that the MPs made progress. They passed the 14 remaining votes in a space of one and half hours. One of the key agreements in the meeting was the raising of the allocation to the National Assembly.<\/p>\n
Although Gondwe announced that an allocation to the National Assembly had been changed, he did not change the amount allocated to the Judiciary, which the MPs wanted raised. He said the K11.3 billion was enough.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have examined where the shortcomings could be. But the amount provided is a large increase from last year\u2019s allocation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He also told the House that they have decided that the Judiciary should buy vehicles duty-free.<\/p>\n
He also announced that on National Local Government Finance Committee which was allocated K239.3 million, Constituency Development Fund (CDF) will be under Recurrent Expenditure, and not Development Expenditure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Members of Parliament (MPs) Friday passed the 2018\/2019 budget which is now pegged at K1.455 trillion. The budget was passed after Minister of Finance, Economic Planning and Development, Goodall Gondwe, was forced to change an allocation to the National Assembly from K13.9 billion to K14.6 billion. The change is expected to accommodate salary increments, one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":60911,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67389","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\/67389","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=67389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67393,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67389\/revisions\/67393"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}