From what has been gathered from three cluster meetings attended, the challenge has been the reduction of funds allocated to government departments. Amongst those with a reduced allocation are the judiciary and national assembly.

According to the Lilongwe Nsinja South parliamentarian Lingson Belekanyama who is chairing the Cluster which has three committees of legal affairs, public appointments, and the commissions, statutory authorities and state enterprises, they have so far met officials from the National assembly and Judiciary.

“What is common between the two organs we have spoken to is that the figures they were promised are not the ones which are appearing in the budget document, for instance the National assembly vote was supposed to be 7.6 billion but it’s less than that" said Belekanyama.

Belekenyama however expressed the hope that they will be able to find funds from other lesser important votes and channel them to the priority votes. The three committees in this cluster will look into 17 votes during the two weeks they have been given.

The other cluster meeting underway has the public accounts, budget and governance assurance committees.

According to  Member of Parliament for Dedza  north west Alekeni Menyani who is chairing the cluster, they are looking at five votes of the Accountant General, Ministry of Finance, The Malawi Revenue Authority, Financial Intelligence Unit and the vote for Unforeseen Expenditure.

" So far  so good, we are making progress, actually what we will do that after finishing scrutinizing each vote we will immediately be referring it to Treasury to appreciate our input" said Menyani.

He however cited a challenge where some documents are not yet ready as they were missed out when printing.

Sharing the challenge of missing documents was Juliana Lunguzi Member of Parliament for Dedza East who is chairing the cluster that has the Health and HIV Aids and Nutrition committees. According to her they failed to meet since the documents with details on their vote are not available.

"We were scheduled to meet officials from the department of HIv Aids and Nutrition but we have rescheduled the meeting to next week Tuesday to give Treasury time to finalise the printing" said Lunguzi.

She therefore expressed the wish to see the autonomy of parliament so that it should be able to handle the printing itself.

Meanwhile Nations Msowoya the Spokesperson for the Ministry of Finance has acknowledged that some documents are still being printed but expressed the hope that they will be made available soon.

Parliament will reconvene for plenary on 8 June, 2015 when the clusters will report back to the whole house their findings.