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Malawian members of parliament face challenges in scrutinizing the national budget most MPs were intellectually incapacitated and that the Malawian constitution did not protect parliamentarians when executing their duties, according to ruling DPP MP Ralph Jooma.

Jooma was speaking at a conference for Association of Parliamentary Budget Committees of a seven chairmen of Sadc Parliamentary Portfolio Committees on Budget and Finance which was held in Harare hotel.

The conference drew delegates from from Malawi, Swaziland, Angola, Mozambique, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe to discuss strategies on how they could strengthen their oversight roles over the Executive pertaining to national budgets.

NewsDay of Zimbabwe quoted Jooma, chairman of Budget and Finance Committee saying Malawian parliament did not also have specialist staff to guide MPs on how best to deal with national budgets.

Jooma said before Malawi parliament approve any budget, they scrutinised it to check if it was in tandem with issues to do with poverty reduction.

“We consider if the budget is in line with pro-poor policies and if it is, we then consider it a good budget,” said Jooma.

“We check if the collection of money through taxation is not to the detriment of the poor and that there is sustainable social development.”

Jooma said Malawi MPs also considered if grants and loans were being used for poverty reduction, for example, law makers check to what extent the budget is supporting issues like primary education, health care and other social services.

“If it is water, we target that most of the resources should be channelled to rural water and in agriculture, we put most of the emphasis on helping poor farmers,” he said according to NewsDay.

“If it is an allocation towards roads we give large chunks to rural roads and not highways because we feel we have to get easy access to farms,” said Jooma.

He said when monitoring the implementation of the budget, parliament checked if the money was being used appropriately and that the funds were decentralised to districts.—Nyasa Times