By Kingsley Jassi
Lilongwe City Council (LCC) is grappling with city rate defaults with the current uncollected revenues growing to K13 billion.
But the council still has hopes that intensified debt collection efforts will see that cleared.
Meanwhile, the LCC has a three-year strategy to achieve improved revenue collection and graduate to financial sustenance, a feat that would ease fiscal pressure on the Central Government which provided K7 billion for the council’s budget support for last year.
- Advertisement -
Like all others, LCC is heavily dependent on the government subventions despite numerous revenue collection and investment opportunities as city rate defaults by businesses and property owners are often cited as the major setback.
- Advertisement -
“Indeed there is still an amount of over K13 billion to be collected by the council and we are doing all we can to collect it. We are optimistic that it will be collected,” responded the council’s director of commerce, Genscher Mbwabwa.
With an estimated number of registered vendors at over 10,000 and 6,000 shops, the capital city is currently enduring a 15 percent vendors’ growth rate, and these numbers are explained by the rapid population growth and high unemployment rates, according to the council.
However, the council sees this as a revenue opportunity and hopes that modernising revenue systems would push the revenue to around K15 billion annually and these efforts are being supported by the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) project’s sub component that works with all city councils and a few district councils on revenue systems improvements.
“The MCA project will indeed help us in revenue collection improvement especially in land-based revenue collection from plot identification, documentation, valuation and others. The whole of this process will be automated,” Mbwabwa said.
- Advertisement -
Financial expert Cosmas Chigwe, said city and district councils should be able to sustain themselves without being supported by the Central Government on operations, challenging them to be more inventive and innovative.
He cited efforts being made by Nkhotakota District Council, which has been seen investing in commercial ventures to expand revenue base, planning to issue municipal bonds while intensifying revenue collection.
“These councils would need to be supported by the Central Government if they were more inventive and creative. I’m not sure about their expenditure lines but I don’t think they have too much to pay for,” Chigwe said.
