As part of the ongoing efforts to combat high-level, serious and organized corruption, CSP, as part of the Alliance Against Corruption (AAC), organized a dinner conference with the honourable members of the Public Accounts Committee and the Legal Affairs Committee of parliament at Sunbird Lilongwe Hotel on 30th September 2019. The meeting was jointly planned and organized by the AAC and the Parliament Secretariat.
The dinner conference brought together members of parliament, AAC secretariat staff, and members of the media from various media houses comprising electronic, print and online media practitioners.
The objective of the dinner conference was to share with MPs the state of high-level, serious and organized corruption in Malawi and, in particular, to discuss the possible areas of collaboration between parliament and AAC. ACC’s view of a holistic approach to fighting high-level corruption appreciates the fact that organized corruption requires an organized approach and strategies which very much rely on the policy and legal framework and political will that are often decided by political leaders.
The discussions led to the following agreements between AAC and the invited parliamentary committee members in the following areas:
- The need to improve collaboration between government, civil society and accountability organisations such as the Anti-Corruption Bureau
- The need to strengthen the law to improve asset recovery, including internationally when funds are moved out of the country
- The need to improve the resourcing of key accountability institutions and parliamentary oversight committees
- The need to address increasing levels of corruption at District and City Council levels
- The need to improve transparency and accountability, particularly through operationalising the Access to Information Act.
- The need for similar standards of accountability and transparency within civil society
- The difficulty in generating evidence for corrupt public institutions
- The limited power of the Parliamentary Accounts Committee to hold people to account
- The limited efforts to address those individuals, groups and companies that are a corrupting influence
