K 91.3B PASSED BY COMMITTEE OF SUPPLY IN THE CURRENT 2014/2015 NATIONAL BUDGET

The Malawi National Assembly has during the first day of the Committee of Supply session on Wednesday passed K91.365 billion from the current 2014/15 budget estimates.

The session will resume today, Thursday, for a full day debate on the same.

The K91.365 billion is the money from 13 votes of 16 various government ministries and departments votes the house managed to deliberate in the day.

Only three votes from vote 070 The Judiciary, vote 080 National Assembly and vote 121 National Local Government Finance Committee have been deferred for further revision and clarifications.

Among the votes that have been passed Office of President and Cabinet (OPC) took much time to be passed as several opposition members insisted that the K2 Billion allocation in the office just for the Green Belt Initiative be moved to Ministry of Agriculture because there are no justifications as to why such initiative had been placed in that office.

But the Minister of Finance clarified in the house that “dual allocations of K2 billion and K800 million have been made to OPC and to the Ministry of Agriculture for the Greenbelt Initiative project, respectively on account of the fact that the Ministry of Agriculture is responsible for the technical aspects of the project, while OPC is the secretariat” and will be providing an oversight role of the programme.