Maravi

Parliament's role will fail if govt doesn't act - Milupi

Parliament's role will fail if govt doesn't act - Milupi
By Lambwe Kachali
Saturday December 01, 2007 [03:00]

Luena member of parliament Charles Milupi has said the oversight role of Parliament will be a failure if the government does not take action over recommendations made by the parliamentary committees on abuse of public resources. Moving a motion in Parliament on Thursday to adopt a report of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on outstanding issues as contained in the report of the Auditor General for the year ended December 31st 2004, Milupi who is committee chairperson said the long list of outstanding issues did not augur well for parliamentary democracy. Milupi said the outstanding issues report needed serious attention.

“Mr Speaker, the oversight role of parliament through your committee systems can only be effective and therefore benefit this nation if there is timely and comprehensive follow up action by the executive on the recommendations of the committee,” he said.

He said it was unfortunate that the government had continued to ignore important reports without proper explanations.

“As may be observed in the report, government did not make considerable efforts in implementing the recommendations of the committee of 2003 accounts in which 60 percent (183 out of 303) issues were addressed and recommended for closure. However, there was a rather worrying downturn on the report of 2004 accounts where only a paltry 14 per cent (28 out of 196) of the queries were addressed,” Milupi said.

He also observed that the delays to implement the recommendations were due to poor record keeping in government institutions.

“Also the inability by the Auditor General to carry out verifications because documents in a number of cases were not available,” Milupi said.

“The Auditor General has been unable to pursue the recovery of the public resources due to lack of vital information and inability to trace some of the companies that accessed credit funds. Because of this, an amount in excess of K70 billion has been lost and has had to be charged against public funds. Seventy billion Kwacha in 1995 was a huge amount. Therefore, the value of opportunities to this country is correspondingly high,” he said.

Milupi urged the Ministry of Finance to ensure that controlling officers that failed to report progress on the recommendations be sanctioned. And seconding the motion, Chipangali member of parliament Vincent Mwale emphasised the importance of record keeping.

Labels: CHARLES MILUPI, PAC, PARLIAMENT

posted by MrK @ 3:39 AM