The comforting yet deeply fraudulent assertion that “Kabambe can’t audit Presidential foreign trips because the law already does” has resurfaced. It relies on a childishly absurd premise: that the law is a living, breathing entity capable of stepping out of a leather-bound volume, walking into the State House, and balancing a ledger.
The law is a blueprint, not a builder. To argue that a statute can execute itself is to mistake the architectural drawing of a fortress for the garrison that defends it. As the nation watches a pattern of undisclosed executive travels and escalating public expenditures, the duty to question these bills is not an act of political overreach—it is an act of democratic necessity.
The claim that “the law audits” commits a classic Reification Fallacy (also known as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness). This error occurs when an abstract concept is treated as a concrete, living agent.
The law cannot audit presidential trips; rather, human beings are empowered by the law to conduct audits. Statutes grant authority, but they require living institutions—and individuals like Dalitso Kabambe—to exercise that authority.
To say the law already does the auditing is akin to saying the penal code catches thieves, rendering the police force entirely redundant. If existing government oversight apparatuses are left unprompted by active civic and political actors, they easily devolve into shields for executive excess rather than tools for truth.
A government that rejects external checks and balances violates the foundational tenets of constitutional democracy. Transparency is not a bureaucratic favour; it is a legal mandate.
Under Section 12 of the Constitution of Malawi, all political authority is derived from the people and must be exercised solely to serve and protect their interests.
Furthermore, Section 12(1)(c) explicitly dictates that: “The authority to exercise power of State is conditional upon the sustained trust of the people of Malawi.”
By rejecting public oversight and transparency on massive foreign travel bills, the administration shatters this trust. Kabambe is not overstepping; he is doing the needful—operationalising the very text the government seeks to hide behind.
The administration’s defense completely crumbles under a strict reading of the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA), 2022. Opponents of an audit rely on the Equivocation Fallacy, shifting the definition of “audit” to mean the mere existence of a budget line item rather than an active, independent, retrospective evaluation of value-for-money.
The law explicitly demands active enforcement, not passive existence. Section 11 & Section 17 (The Mandate of Prudence) are explicitly designed to ensure the “efficient, effective and economic recognition and accounting for, and reporting of, public resources.” They place a strict statutory burden on Controlling Officers to justify every single kwacha spent.
The truth is that no office, including the Presidency, is exempt from economic scrutiny. When foreign trips consume scarce foreign exchange under the guise of statecraft, the PFMA requires proof of financial prudence.
To understand why we cannot simply “wait for the law to audit itself,” we must confront the painful scars of Malawi’s history. Trusting a government to quietly manage its own records without rigorous, real-time adversarial probing is the exact vulnerability that birthed our worst national tragedies.
The infamous Capital Hill Cashgate Scandal proved that when systems are left unmonitored, public funds vanish rapidly. The subsequent Baker Tilly Forensic Audit exposed how weak controls, deleted transaction records, and payments for unperformed services looted an estimated $32 million from the state treasury. The lesson was clear: the system does not protect itself; it requires unyielding human oversight.
More recently, independent forensic audits into government expenditures—such as the COVID-19 Funds Audit—revealed a systemic culture where cabinet officials and senior aides routinely abused public money under the guise of “foreign trip allowances” and irregular travel procurement.
The massive public outcry surrounding Vice President Jane Ansah’s UK trip—where leaked documents exposed an expenditure of close to K1.9 billion for what was initially downplayed as a “private trip”—underscores that executive travel is a primary pipeline for bleeding national reserves.
History screams that waiting for retrospective reports to emerge years after the treasury has been emptied is a fool’s errand. Real-time accountability is the only antidote to systemic looting.
The wealth of a nation cannot be squandered on vanity tours while hospitals lack basic medicine and schools crumble. We must break our silence.
Demanding transparency fosters a culture of civic dignity. It transforms taxpayers from passive subjects into active shareholders of the republic, directly linking public sacrifice to leadership accountability.
Forcing compliance strengthens the rule of law. It cements the vital precedent that no individual, no matter how powerful, is above constitutional scrutiny.
Every kwacha saved from an unaudited foreign junket is a kwacha that can be reinvested into life-saving healthcare, clean water, and quality education. Public finance accountability is the ultimate guarantor of human rights.
In conclusion, the law provides the teeth; leaders, civil society, and active citizens must provide the bite. It is time for all sectors of society to stand firm and demand that the state treasury serves the people, not the palace.