Mutharika slams donors

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Peter Mutharika Prince Andrew
Peter Mutharika Prince Andrew
Mutharika with the Duke of York in London

Malawi President Peter Mutharika has slammed the country’s donors under the Common Approach to Budget Support (CABS) for employing tactics that has alienated government to monitor their programmes.

Speaking in London while courting investors, Mutharika warned that should donors not resume aid, Malawi should as well forget about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that global leaders adopted recently as replacement for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Mutharika revealed that donors decision to withdrawal direct budgetary support because of the cashgate scandal that saw government and the then ruling People’s Party officials stealing over K24 billion of public funds has resulted in a barrier to effectively screen the impact of the support that donors are providing. Aid is now channeled through international organizations working in Malawi. Mutharika said this made it impossible to document actual strides that Malawi made on the MDGs in the past 2 years.

“One of the main challenges that my government faced when implementing the MDGs, which may also recur in the SDGs is that our cooperating partners stopped providing budget support following a pilferage of public funds in the previous administration. Donor support is now being provided outside the government budget making it difficult to monitor and evaluate the impact of these off budget programmes”.

Another audit analysis by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) with support from the German government established that K0.6 trillion (K553 billion) was uncounted for during the Joyce Banda administration. According to the Analysis, K17 billion was presumably misappropriated during the second term of Bingu wa Mutharika.