Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (Macra) has indicated that it posted a profit of K13 billion for the year ended March 2024.
This represents a 62.5 percent increase in profit for the regulator when compared to the K8 billion posted in the year ended March 2023.
The revelation was made by Macra Director General Daud Suleman over the weekend in Blantyre during a media interface.
He indicated that the money has since been declared to the shareholder, Secretary to the Treasury.
“The past five years, the regulator was making a profit of about K5 billion but before last financial year (2022-23), we moved to K8 billion. This last financial year, which ended in March 2024, we’ve gone to K13 billion. The key issue has been the way we’ve approached our compliance issues.
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“People are now proactive to pay what belongs to Macra when that is due. The same thing with MTL. We have just issued new licences to MTL but they owed us K9 billion. We told them we were going to close them until money was paid and they did just that. Today no player under our mandate owes us,” Suleman said.
In the 2024-25 budget statement, Minister of Finance Simplex Chithyola Banda indicated that to enhance the monitoring of revenue collected by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), all 22 regulatory SOEs have fully migrated their revenue accounts to the Reserve Bank of Malawi.
He said the minister has developed a performance assessment framework to ensure that best-performing SOEs are properly recognised.
“This will promote a culture of excellence in SOEs for better financial management and service delivery. The goal is to improve the performance of SOEs so that, over and above service delivery, they should generate returns on government investments and remit dividends.
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“In the 2024-25 financial year, my ministry will roll out this arrangement to the remaining SOEs, including subverted organisations and trading SOEs. This arrangement will significantly improve dividends and surplus remittances, thereby widening the non-tax revenue base. This will also reduce the tendency of the government to borrow its own resources,” Chithyola said.
