Lack of seriousness mars Lilongwe Council meet
Almost an hour was Monday spent on scrutinising minutes of four previous council meetings at the beginning of 6th Ordinary Council meeting in Lilongwe.
The meeting was largely delayed because of concerns over spellings of some names and words.
Ironically, the agenda was loaded with issues that were meant to uplift the city.
Among them were reports on the implementation of council resolutions, report on staff sit-in held on November 26, 2015 and Local Revenue Enhancement Strategic Plan.
But in the course of the meeting, Member of Parliament for Lilongwe City South East, Bentley Namasasu, reminded the meeting his first name is spelt as ‘Bentley’ not ‘Bentrey’.
Another councillor wondered why somewhere it was written ‘Honorable’ and not ‘Honourable’.
Another councillor even used unprintable words when showing his anger on the wrong spellings in the minutes.
Lilongwe City Deputy Mayor, Akwame Bandawe, who chaired the meeting, however, asked him to withdraw the word and he did.
In an interview later,
Bandawe said in a group there may be some people who may go out of order.
“When there are two or three people, we should expect that. We cannot be thinking in the same line. That’s why I ruled him out of order and he withdrew the word,” he said.
He added: “We are serious. We cannot rush the meeting just for the sake of rushing. There were minutes of more than one meeting and we needed to look at them critically before adopting them.”
Lilongwe City Council Chief Executive, Executive Officer, Moza Zeleza, highlighted the business lined up for the meeting.
“There are quite a number of issues we are trying to look at when we have a full council meeting. There are a number of strategies that we want to put to the council to ratify so that we start implementing. One of them is Local Revenue Enhancement Strategy Plan. We would like to see how best we can generate revenue to undertake activities. We need to increase resource base, which will benefit the citizens of Lilongwe,” Zeleza said.
In the afternoon, the councillors became serious with issues they were discussing. However, elements of laissez faire continued to manifest themselves
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