* I will continue with this migration policy to include fully sub-vented organizations and commercial SOEs
* President Lazarus Chakwera said this in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) in Parliament today
By Duncan Mlanjira
As part of economic reforms President Lazarus Chakwera’s administration embarked on a wholesale review of regulatory state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and statutory parastatals to ensure that those that are productive and profitable are made more efficient and those that just consume and make losses are administered a radical cure.
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Chakwera announced this in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) in Parliament today, saying bank accounts of 22 SOEs and statutory bodies have already been migrated the from commercial banks to the Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM).
“I will continue with this migration policy to include fully sub-vented organizations and commercial SOEs,” he told the august House.
“My reason for doing that is simple — the practice over the past 20 years of having public bodies deposit their revenues with commercial banks so that Government is made to borrow its own money at high interest rates for the enrichment of a few, is a practice that lacks seriousness, and you can go tell whoever created that system that by the end of this coming fiscal year, I am shutting it down.
“Whether anyone likes it or not, inch by inch and layer by layer, we are dismantling every part of this system that was put in place by people who were not serious.
“This is also why, Madam Speaker, when this august House recently asked me to sign a Bill designed to take public resources and share them among political parties in Parliament — regardless of whether they qualify for public funding as stipulated in Section 40 of the Constitution — I rejected the Bill and sent it back because we cannot continue creating systems that show a lack of seriousness.”
He added that in country’s development, “the only behaviour that shows seriousness is that which helps us focus on our priorities”.
This, he said, is part of taking advantage of the progress his administration is making in recovering the economy in which in the last quarter he ordered austerity measures to ensure that every agency and department that handles public funds is focused on using those resources on economic priorities — not on excesses that show a lack of seriousness”.
“When I stood here to deliver a State of the Nation Address on the 12th of May 2021, I made it very clear that our top priorities are food security, job creation, and wealth creation.
“Similarly, I have said again and again for the past 14 months that the way to achieve food security, job creation, and wealth creation in the shortest time possible is to boost productivity in agriculture, tourism and mining sectors, or what I have called the ATM Strategy.
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“So, if these are our priorities, then we cannot afford to continue wasting our limited resources on things that are not productive. If these are our priorities, then we must get serious by investing in them more than we invest in partisan politics.
“If these are our priorities, we must get serious by putting resources into them instead of our personal entitlements. If these are our priorities, we must get serious by working together to promote them across MDAs instead of engaging in territorialism through institutional turf wars.
“If these are our priorities, we must get serious by taming our appetite to spend public resources on nonproductive activities and non-productive public sector bodies.
“If achieving food security, job creation, and wealth creation through ATM is our priority, I said, then this is where we must put our hardest-working and smartest officials — not those who are lazy and complacent.”
The President further said he believed that everyone’s “concerted effort in promoting and leveraging these priorities, holds the promise of greater growth than what the economists are projecting”.
“I believe that if our economy is already in recovery and projected to continue growing incrementally based on the progress our Ministries, government department and agencies (MDAs) have made this year — when their efforts have not been focused on the ATM Strategy — then there is no reason our economy should not grow exponentially when the efforts of all our MDAs prioritize promoting productivity in agriculture, mining and tourism for the achievement of food security, job creation, and wealth creation.”
He then went on to report the progress his administration has made in various areas to fast-track the achievement of food security, job creation, and wealth creation through the ATM Strategy.
