CCAP advocacy group tells Malawi govt to effectively stem graft
Church and Society the developmeny arm of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian ( CCAP) Synod of Livingstonia says Malawi continues to lose 30 per cent of its K1 trillion national budget to corruption.
Human rights activist Moses Mkandawire, who is executive director of Church and Society Programme, has since called on the government to show commitment to end corruption.
“We are one of the top corrupt countries in the world. This should not be the case at all,” he said when United Against Serious and Organised Corruption (UASOC) an interface meeting with some media practitioners in Malawi’s Capital Lilongwe on Thursday evening.
UASOC, a collaboration of the Church and Society Program, has joined hands with the Law Society of Malawi, Youth and Society and other organizations to fight corruption.
“We, the four organisations, have set a good example in coming together to fight corruption. Malawi needs more of these collaborations and the important role of the media cannot be ruled out,” said Mkandawire.
Mkandawire said time has come for Malawians to stand up and fight corruption because the authorities are passive on graft fight.
According to Mkandawire, Malawi has lost about K2.4 trillion over the last decade through various forms of corruption.
He said such a huge amount of money could have been used to resuscitate the government’s collapsed social service provision system in one of the World’s poorest countries.
In fact, Malawi has moved only a single step up in the just released results of the 2018 Corruption Perception Index that have placed the country on position 120 among the least corrupt countries.The country was on position 122 in 2017.
President Peter Mutharika has always denied that there is corruption in government challenging those with evidence to come forward with evidence.
Malawians were recently shocked to learn that Pioneer Investment of Sameer Karim made a claim to Police of an additional K466 million and deposited K145 million into a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) account at Standard Bank whose sole signatory is President Mutharika, a day after getting the contract payment and later K85 million worth of vehicles.
Mutharika said these were “donations” to his ruling DPP.
The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB), which is rated poorly in the fight against graft, cleared the President, but arrested owner of Pioneer Investment and two senior police officers in connection with the excess claim of K466 million.
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Asking DPP to end corruption is giving them an impossible task. They do not have The will and capacity to do it. At political campaigns how many times has APM had said he would be end corruption. He talks about numbers of infrastructure he had completed and the more he intends to do after re-election. He totally gave up the fight against corruption. He admitted defeat silently. If DPP was to end corruption half its cabinet and CEOs would be imprisoned for graft. And that we all know can not happen. CSOs should go flat out in communities and remoid… Read more »