By Emmanuel Chilemba:
It never rains but pours for the Central Government which, having made local councils endure three months without allocations before giving them the money last Friday, now finds itself in a situation where it is yet to pay some civil servants salaries for January.
The Daily Times has established that the affected civil servants include those from the Malawi Prison Service and ministries of Information and Education.
Some of the civil servants we have spoken to expressed concern over the development, saying they were yet to settle rental fees.
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They also said they were failing to make ends meet.
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“We have been severely affected by the problem of delayed salaries. Our last payment was on December 19 last year and, since then, we have had to struggle to buy food, pay school fees for our children and take care of our families. All these responsibilities have been compromised by this delay.
“Furthermore, we have loans from various banks which we agreed to be repaying on specific dates. Now that it’s February, we are facing fines for failing to settle our debts on time, which is adding another layer of problems to our already difficult situation,” claimed one civil servant who confided in us.
Another civil servant said their bosses were not giving them concrete answers as to what has been happening on the issue of their salaries.
Secretary to the Treasury Betchani Tchereni referred The Daily Times to the office of the Accountant General, saying his office already worked on the same.
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“In fact, all salaries were processed in good time from Treasury to the Accountant General and even from there, too, they were processed in good time to the RBM [Reserve Bank of Malawi] for payments.
“You’ll get more information from the Accountant General [to the effect] that the 69,000 files were already processed in good time,” Tchereni said.
Nonetheless, efforts to catch up with Accountant General Henrey Mphasa, proved futile as did not pick our calls despite us making several attempts.
On his part, Malawi Congress of Trade Unions President Charles Kumchenga said they learned about the matter through social media.
He described the development as unfortunate, fearing that the move might affect production levels in affected sectors.
“If this issue is true, the employees were supposed to be communicated to on why they have not received their salaries on time. This is very unfortunate and can even affect productivity at the workplace,” Kumchenga said.
The development is coming at a time Local Government Authorities have just been paid after going three months without getting Other Recurrent Transactions (ORT) funding from the Central Government.
This is according to an Analysis of the Third Quarter Fiscal Space for Local Governments in Malawi for the 2024-25 Fiscal Year has shown.
According to the analysis, which Malawi Local Government Association (Malga) prepared, failure to access the funds had affected areas such as city roads maintenance, the devolved 10 percent drug funding and dualisation of Chileka Road.
“Constituency Development Fund has the largest share of unfunded resources for the third quarter at K9.65 billion (45 percent of the total amount). City roads sector failed to access K4.4 billion, representing 20 percent of funds not transferred.
“The health sector did not receive funding for health ORT and the devolved 10 percent of health drugs amounting to K3.14 million and K624 million, respectively. The period under review is the beginning of the rainy season such that the failure by the Central Government to transfer the amount of K470 million to Local Government Authorities (LGAs) resulted into farmers failing to access agricultural extension services on time.
“Other devolved sectors such as Disaster, Forestry, Fisheries and Irrigation inclusive [sic] did not get funding amounting to K828 million for the two months for operations as the period under review is crucial and seasonal in nature,” the analysis showed.
However, almost all councils had received their allocations by Friday last week.
