Foreword by the Finance Minister
I am so pleased that it has been recognized that some achievements
have been made by the Ministry of Finance in terms
of leadership. It is not a one man’s show, because we are a team. I
have a deputy, Honorable Ted Kalebe, we have the secretary to the
treasury and at the centre of our ministry we have various departments
that provide leadership.
The most important thing that we have achieved
this year is to have everybody particularly at the top, understand what
exactly we want to achieve. We had in mind, a challenge of exercising
fiscal discipline, the effectiveness of resources at the disposal of
government through the budget and how to ensure that the little we have
can be used effectively and provide services that are effective towards
bringing economic development and growth.
Everybody in the system was also made to understand that the part they
play must be seen to be going into the attainment of these objectives.
In this case, we had a number of objectives set for us. IMF agreed
goals and targets, and fi scal discipline objectives that would have been
there anyway and were exercised in tandem with these IMF goals.
The leadership understood this and so did the people in the budget division,
the economics division, the accountant general division, and the debt
management division, then we synchronized that with the Reserve Bank
with whom we have meetings weekly where we review whether or
not we are set on target course. Where we think we will not meet the
target, we ensure that we take steps to ensure that the targets are met.
We also have programs set with World Bank but more importantly in
early 2006, we decided that it will be our responsibility to ensure that
this country does achieve the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC)
completion point and so we started this index on how to achieve the
requirements. The leadership that is there knew and understood its
responsibility particularly in achieving the completion point of HIPC.
We had set objectives, I was very happy that the understanding of
the objectives touched not only the leadership but also permeated
through to the lowest levels of the department therefore one can say
as a group, as a ministry, we set out to achieve the objectives.
So you asked me what have we have achieved. Of course people
will talk about the completion point, the fact that we have attained
all IMF targets, also that we have been able to liberalize the
country’s tax system and we have been able to do a number of
things, in particular the establishment of the system of controlling the
expenditure, which was attempted in the first place with the support
by the World Bank and expertise from outside.
Since 2000, for five or six years, there had been attempts to get this done
and now we decided that we would get rid of World Bank and technical expertise
from outside. We decided that we would look at seeing how other African countries
have done it and then do it ourselves. Everybody is very surprised at how this was
done because we are the only country in Africa that has managed this without
support from outside.
I was therefore very happy that Incmedia recognized and awarded the
Department of Finance for doing very well during the year.
I hope that we can do better next time, since we have yet other
objectives to pursue in the coming year. The most important thing
however is to continue efforts towards economic growth rate that
the president has set for this year. As a country, we have gone to
about 8.5 % of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), again one of the
highest since we became Malawi. We have also been able to
produce tremendous amount of Agriculture output, again one of the
best achieved in this country’s history. We therefore hope we could
do more and as you know, nothing can be done if you don’t to it to
the best. So, on behalf of the Ministry of Finance, I thank incmedia
for recognizing our work and we promise the nation that we will do
much better next time.
Honorable Dr. Goodall Gondwe
Minister of Finance
Republic of Malawi
