Africa-Press – Malawi. A case of a young lady who had resolved to camp at Capital Hill to force authorities to pay her father’s pension inundated the social media the past two days.
It attracted the attention of all the big shots in town—and what we later learnt was that those responsible for administering the pensions immediately got onto their toes to scamper around and conclude processes towards releasing the money.
Thanks to the social media, the matter attracted the necessary attention and everyone in the pension chain came forward to declare how they had done or were doing their part. Top government officials themselves thrust themselves into the matter because it painted a bad picture of the whole system.
But the truth remains that thousands of pensioners out there are struggling to access their money mostly because of the incompetence or business-as-usual approach by those responsible for processing the funds, at the Accountant General’s Department.
Not everyone has the opportunity to have their issues captured by the social media so that their plight can go far and wide. Not everyone has relatives at Capital Hill who will hasten the processing of their pensions.
There are pensioners who cannot manage to be travelling to Lilongwe now and then to knock on the doors of the “big bosses” asking them to process their pensions.
It becomes even more complicated in cases of death gratuities. Those left behind struggle to access the funds to the point that some even reach the point of giving up.
In fact, there have been allegations of some officers ‘stealing’ the money after frustrating families of deceased public servants. In essence, all this speaks volumes about a broken system that is refusing to move with times.
There are public officers at Capital Hill who are still stuck with the traditional ways of doing things— that there is no speed in government affairs—or are simply incompetent or crooked, but are left to carry on their work because the system abhors proficiency.
It has been nurtured that way. You see, there was a time President Lazarus Chakwera and Vice-President Saulos Chilima overpoweringly talked about overhauling the public service so that it should really serve Malawians.
They together launched strategies, policies, service charters and all manner of tactics to enhance the performance of the public service. For all the enthusiasm and spectacle, what we are seeing is a deteriorating public service that harshly fails to serve the country.
Regarding the pension malaise, it is strange that there has never been any serious attempt by this government to get to the bottom of why so many people complain about not being assisted.
When people retire, they expect to get their money which they served while working and it is purely wicked for someone to keep tossing them from one office to another, as though they are beggars.
The problem is that the incompetent officers who are responsible for administering pension money erroneously believe such money should not be released in two months but years.
They are the bosses who, while sitting in their air-conditioned and elegantly furnished offices behind those coffee mahogany tables, do not care about the suffering of others.
Well, it is not so much about caring about the suffering of anyone, but simply doing your job right. Countries that have progressed and beat poverty significantly revamped their public service systems because they are the bedrocks of development.
With our indolent and incompetent civil service— where workers cannot even account for what they earn at the end of the month— we will remain one of the poorest countries in the world. Sadly, all the passion that Chakwera and company set off with after that historic election withered away just months into office.
So, Malawi is still in search of a leader who will be angry at our poverty and work at correcting all the errors that have been there for years including massaging a public service system that fails to live up to its billing.
In countries where the government machinery is perfectly working, pensioners and deceased workers’ families do not wait for eternity to access their funds. In Malawi, the norm is a very strange one. The delays result in the value of money being significantly eroded.
Right now, we are talking about the 44 percent devaluation of the Kwacha and thousands of public workers who retired in the past years are yet to access their pension money.
The time they get the funds, the value will have been significantly diminished. Unfortunately, the fraud and sheer incompetence in the management of pension funds is a reality which the country’s top leadership seems to have even blessed. After all, Malawi’s public service is a terribly fractured system that no on.
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