Malawi House meets again Tuesday after Monday’s abandoned session

Malawi’s troubled parliament reconvenes Tuesday following the premature stopping of Monday afternoon’s session due to disagreements on the way forward between the government side and the majority opposition.

The bone of contention was that the government side wanted to change the order paper, whereby the Minister of Finance Goodall Gondwe presented to the house a three-month financial budget of 35 billion kwacha (US$4.9 billion ) from 1 August to 31 October.

The three-month budget is expected to act as a stop-gap measure as the MPs sort out their differences on the conduct of other business in the house.

The disagreement started when deputy leader of government business, Trade Minister Ken Lipenga moved a motion to allow the house to discuss and pass on the finance minister’s resolution on the 2007/2008 Budget.

Explaining his reasoning, Lipenga noted that the budget was long overdue and needed to be discussed and adopted as soon as possible.

"This is a people’s budget. It is not a political but rather a moral issue. Let us adopt it so that we can save the lives of poor Malawians," the minister said, in apparent reference to the funds that are needed to secure medicine for Malawi’s free medical care.

But the opposition members were not impressed. Instead, they went ahead to shoot down the motion by asking the House to follow the agenda on the order paper.

House opposition leader John Tembo said parliament should pass the three-month budget in the order as listed on the agenda paper.

"We don’t want to be blamed for the budget failure because people out there are being told that the opposition side wants to reject the budget — which is not true," Tembo said.

In other words, Tembo wanted the House to discuss the issued of the defecting MPs and when their seats will be declared vacant in accordance with the constitution.

The government side, not happy with this proposal, countered by asking the Speaker of Parliament, Louis Chimango, to adjourn the session till Tuesday.