Permanent Secretary – PS in charge of Administration at the Ministry of Local Government Maambo Haamaundu has admitted that the delay in the utilization of the Constituency Development Funds – CDF is not all as a result of bureaucracy, but is also caused by the process of approval that has been laid out for the said funds.
This follows the Minister of Finance – Situmbeko Musokotwane accusation of incompetence on the part of Ministry of local government officials handling CDF who seem to have failed to timely disburse the first quarter funds even after treasury released the first tranche. Quarter two is now done and no CDF disbursement has been successfully made.
Haamaundu said that the said process involved to disburse and enable the utilization of CDF funds are things that are sitting in the law and in regulation. These regulations were developed centrally as a guide on how the funds would be handled.
In an exclusive interview with the Zambian Business Times – ZBT, the PS said that there are a number of projects which have come through to the Ministry of Local Government, thus the ministry will compile a report by the end of the month [May 2022] which will be revealed to the public and show what has been done.
He said that his the Ministry is on course in making disbursements but will not release money just for the sake of it. He told ZBT that the members of the constituency development committee have been advised to take a leaf from the planning and budgeting act to plan ahead, because the act gives broad framework in terms of the developmental priorities.
“Members of the constituency development committee must establish a priority framework in which they operate from”, he said.
Haamaundu said that the problems being experienced now are good problems because they are informing on which doors should be unlooked for people on hoe to better lives, it is not something that is so worrying because money is available, so there need to utilise the money to improve the social economic status of a society and members of the society.
Minister of Local Government Garry Nkombo has not issued any target timelines in which members of the public can expect these bottlenecks to be removed. Zambia has 156 constituencies and four billion Kwacha (K4 billion) was allocated towards the different constituencies in the national budget for each constituency to meet their specific developmental agenda. Each constituency will have about $1.5 million to spend.
The decentralization of spend has been welcomed by most citizens but red tape and incompetence has been sighted as the major challenge is fully leveraging this shift. Some have accused government of not having enough funds and using technicalities to avoid disbursing the funds as only quarter one funds have been released when by now, quarter three funds should ideally be released.
Others say the Ministry of Local Government which is struggling to get rid of garbage in major cities and towns of Zambia has no competence to timely handle CDF disbursement, let alone implement the controls that are needed to monitor the use of funds.
