Minister of Local Government, Unity and Culture, Richard Chimwendo Banda says there must be a good correlation between councils achieving good audit results and improving basic needs and other services to the communities and this calls collaboration within the ministry for poor Malawians to receive their needs.
The Minister was speaking today at Sunbird Livingstonia Beach in Salima district where a technical audit report on council’s project report was tendered under the performance based grants through the Governance to Enable Service Delivery (GESD) which is funded by World Bank.
In his remarks, Chimwendo said releasing a good report without service delivery to the people is a nullity.
“While clean audits are not the only indicator of good service delivery, there must be is a clear correlation between achieving good audit outcome and improving services to communities. The councils have a constitutional duty coordinate and improve the crucial areas of water and sanitation, road network infrastructure, clinics, school blocks among others as championed by President Dr Lazarus Chakwera.
“For this reason, i would like to task all councils that next year one of the indicators will be “timeline on service delivery” as most project take long time to be finished due to laissez faire attitude.
Meanwhile, the Local Authorities Performance Assessment (LAPA) has rated Dowa District council as the best performing council in the country in areas of development planning, procurement, financial management, accounting and health service delivery among others. They cart home K774,109,512. They were seconded by Mchinji and Kasungu respectively.
For the first time, all the 28 districts in the country have qualified the grants worth K16 billion.
Meanwhile, NBS Bank has donated K2.5 million for the cleaning of the Dowa district central market area.
So far, the audit report has revealed that out of 327 projects that the councils submitted had a lot of gaps.
It has been reported that 12 projects representing 4% under the Performance Based Grants ( PBG) had serious defects with cracks on the floors, walls and foundations which were attributed to natural disasters and use of substandard materials.
“Imagine 65 projects which represent 19% of the PBG had moderate defects with 89 projects having minor defects representing 27%. At this juncture, let me warn any contractor who is specialist in substandard jobs that your days are numbered and that soon you will be reported to the National Construction Authority,” warned Chimwendo Banda who is also Leader of Government Business in Parliament.
Chimwendo also revealed that a total of 166 projects were completed with no defects representing 49% while 51% of the projects had defects caused by poor workmanship, cyclones among others.
Chimwendo was accompanied by his deputy, Owen Chomanika, principal Secretaries among other stakeholders.
