By Sellah Singini
Dedza District Council locally generated revenue is said to have declined by 50 percent due to Covid-19 pandemic.
In an interview with Malawi News Agency (Mana), District Commissioner (DC) for Dedza, Emmanuel Bulukutu said the decline of local revenue has affected the operations of the Council with direct employees being heavily affected.
“Our monthly projection for the Council on the locally generated revenue was at K 6 million plus but currently, we are getting half of that. The trend in our markets is the same, for example, at Dedza central market, we used to collect K80, 000.00 and plus per day but now we are getting less than half of that amount,
“Though, we are celebrating that people are responding to the messages of Covid-19 that we are disseminating, some of them have stopped patronising our markets as shown by the decline of our revenue. Our operations have greatly been affected considering that our wage bill is above K 5 million but we are only getting K 3 million from the locally generated revenue,” he said.
Bulukutu said the situation was making the Council not to pay their employees on time and at the same time, accumulating more arrears for the Council.
He added that payment of Council utilities and essential services like garbage collection and sanitation has become a big problem, considering that the Council was already having arrears for their workers for some months.
According to the DC, the Council was looking forward for the assistance from the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development.
Chief Economist in the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development,Flemings Nyirenda said the Ministry has already done an assessment in all the Councils in terms of how Covid-19 has impacted on their activities, including payment of salaries of direct employees.
He added that they have since compiled and submitted to government wage bills for all the councils for the period of three months for possible support.
