Office of Ombudsman is optimistic that the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed with National Initiative for Civic Education (NICE) will take its services to all hard to reach areas across the country.
NICE in the MOU is expected to carry out civic education and facilitate people’s complaints to the Ombudsman office.
Ombudsman office admits financial challenges have crippled operations of the office. It fails to support officers to reach out to people across the country and finds NICE as a great help to work with for it has offices all the way down to grass root level.
NICE officers will get trained on identifying matters and on complaint handling in order to supplement Office of Ombudsman mandate of monitoring public service delivery of all public offices and increase presence across the country.
“Now as you are aware NICE has a grassroots, have their offices all the way down to grass root level and that is where this MOU is so important to us and I must admit that am really excited. Because with that then overnight we are able to cover the nation instead of us crying foul that we are underfunded” said Ombudsman Hon Justice Mrs. Tujilane Chizumila
She said Ombudsman has presence in four regional offices; Mzuzu which covers whole Northern region, Lilongwe which covers the whole Central region, Balaka which covers whole Eastern region and Blantyre which covers the whole Southern region.
“So you can imagine a vulnerable person from Nsanje to reach Blantyre and a vulnerable person from Chitipa to reach Mzuzu it’s really asking too much from these vulnerable but, with that training then the NICE officers will be bringing that information to our regional offices.” said Chizumila
She added “I have forewarned members of staff of Ombudsman that they should be prepared for an avalanche of complaints reaching us. But that is what our mandate is all about.”
From this year’s budget, Government has allocated Other Recurrent Transactions (ORT) to a tune of K90 million only, yet the office handles a lot of matters from across the country including conducting investigations.
“There are so many issues involved; we need offices, staff to cover the whole nation, transport, funding for salaries if we are to ask for new officers, funding for stationary and all that. Mind you, most of the vulnerable people who come here most of them are so poor that they cannot even afford to write their complaint on a piece of paper, they can’t afford to buy paper or pen. The reason being that according to the law every compliant that has to come to this office must be in writing. So we are the ones who issue them with stationary.” She explained
Hon Chizumila further noted that the country needs to establish different Ombudsman offices to handle different complaints than having single ‘public’ Ombudsman.
National Initiative for Civic Education (NICE) executive director, Ollen Mwalubunju said his organization is ready to educate the public as well as facilitate complaints to office of Ombudsman.
He said NICE finds it fit to carry out the task diligently since it has similar roles with that of Ombudsman office particularly on fostering democratic governance.
Having structures spread countrywide with 8000 volunteers and 31 district offices, Mwalubunju was optimistic that they will manage play the role of providing information on how people can access Ombudsman offices and fill all gaps that exists with office of Ombudsman.
Mwalubunju said carrying out the civic education is aright partnership which will give Ombudsman services to rural people and not only to urban people as it has been the case.
He said NICE has several approaches that are going to make the civic education of this task fruitful just like they successfully managed civic education during the last elections.
NICE will be forwarding some matters to Ombudsman in an effort to carryout Ombusdman mandate of monitoring public service delivery of all public offices across the country.
At the signing ceremony that took place at the Ombudsman office in the Capital city, Lilongwe some two weeks ago, ‘Then’ Ombudsman Hon Justice Mrs. Tujilane Chizumila on behalf of Ombudsman office signed the MOU with Ollen Mwalubunju Exectutive Director for NICE on behalf of NICE.
