On 31st January 2009 Micah Challenge Zambia held a meeting at Savoy on the National Budget entitled A Reflection on the 2009 National Budget which targeted Christian Professionals. The main speaker was Mr Japo Mbetwa (A fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants -ACCA and the Zambia Institute of Certified Accountants. He is also Finance Director and Chief Operational Officer for the Jasembe Enterprises LTD). Rev Derrick Mutungu (Chairperson of the Zambia Christian Chamber of Commerce) was the respondent.
As we called for this meeting it was our observation that Christian professionals are socially, economically and politically alienated from the main stream of national development. The church most often does not have adequate and reliable data to engage with precision and certainty on the nature, extent and magnitude of national problems. We sensed that there is room for the church through its Christian professionals to speak prophetically into gaps that are in the policies and guidelines for government institutions dealing with development, especially in areas of HIV/AIDS, gender, youth, trade and poverty. We identified monitoring of the implementation of our national budget as one way Christian professionals can engage with national developmental issues. Government normally comes up with good budget to address issues facing our nation but the citizen especially the church rarely hold the government accountable in the way it implements the activities.
Resolutions of the Savoy Hotel meeting were shared with the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia (EFZ). Some of the resolutions were part of EFZ’s presentation to the Parliamentary Expanded Committee on Estimates. See below an article from the Post Newspaper which captured the EFZ presentation on the national budget.
Government should cut NCC Delegates –EFZ 9th February, 2009.
The Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia (EFZ) on Friday submitted to a parliamentary Expanded Committee on Estimates that the government should cut down on the number of National Constitution Conference (NCC) delegates due to the global economic crisis.
The committee, which was chaired by Lukulu East Member of Parliament Batuke Imenda, comprised chairpersons of all parliamentarian select committees.
Making the submission on the 2009 budget estimates, EFZ advocacy programme officer Myiya Mwandawande said the current economic situation could not support such a large number of delegates at the NCC.
“With the current economic meltdown, we ask government to scale down the number of membership in the NCC in order to free up some resources for economic development. We are aware that there are people participating in the NCC in the name of the church. But I would like to state that these are some of the people government can remove because EFZ is not participating in the NCC. So these people are either representing themselves or their individual churches, not the EFZ,” he said.
Mwandawande further submitted that the government should reduce on the number of ministries and channel more funds into job creation.
“We recommend that the government reduce the number of ministries in order to have a lean government which will exhibit government’s commitment to save money. These funds will in turn be redirected to the social sector such as education and health. We further recommend that the government should avail more funds towards the preservation of jobs and creating new ones and ultimately protecting those in the mines,” he submitted.
Mwandawande also said the government should cut down expenditure on VIPs.
Government should cut down expenditure on VIPs through Ministry of Works and Supply. We therefore ask government to rationalize expenditure toward actual poverty reduction programmes aimed at empowering communities through social and economic sectors’ increased funding. We ask the government to uphold to windfall taxes in the mining sector. Funds raised from same should be directed to the social sector,” he said.
On agriculture, Mwandawande submitted that members of parliament and the government review the use of funds channeled to the agriculture sector.
“The government together with all the stakeholders should develop an accountability and transparency programme to deal the agricultural sector. Members of parliament and government to review the actual expenditure for funds availed to small scale farmers and the improvement of food security. We recommend the review of staff and ministerial heads who mismanaged the resources in the previous financial year. It would be outrageous to give them custody of extra funds,” submitted Mwandawande.
