What began as a routine upgrade of Blantyre Police Station has spiralled into a high‑stakes public finance malfeasance that could cost taxpayers double the original contract value, Weekend Nation investigations show.
The project, scheduled for completion in April 2022, remained an unfinished three‑storey shell with works at 76 percent as of December 2022. Yet, somehow, works certified for payment stood at nearly 98 percent, according to documents we have seen and in-depth interviews with well-placed sources in government ministries involved in the project.
The execution of the contract started on April 15 2019 and was supposed to be concluded by April 15 2022, but our visit to the site on February 5 this year, the same day top Ministry of Homeland Security officials also toured the project , showed that the structure is far from completion.
In fact, Minister of Homeland Security Peter Mukhito, who was part of the tour; told Weekend Nation in an interview that the money already disbursed is now close to K6 billion and that an additional K4 billion is required to finish the works.
If approved, the total public cost for the station would total K10 billion, prompting one structural engineer with project management expertise to question whether there is value for money in such a project while worrying about stewardship of public funds.
“In terms of lost value for money, you may say as a country we have lost an opportunity to construct this office within a manageable budget. But in construction terms, value is more than the actual expenditure; it accounts for the retain period of the structure. Thus, we are spending a lot more than we could but we have not completely lost on value,” the engineer said.
Payment records and a technical audit of the project point to procedural breaches, suspicious interim payme
nts and large purchases that far exceed the original budget and well ahead of actual works.
The documents show that the contractor—City Building Contractors (CBC)—was certified for K5 223 772 006.85, about 97.8 percent of the accepted contract value, which was K5 339 074 504.13, exposing a wide gap between work completed and what should have been paid for.
Our investigation has also uncovered a pattern of oversight failures and conflict of interest. For example, the Ministry of Homeland Security, the project client, placed the Director of Buildings in the Buildings Department of the Ministry of Transport and Public Works in the dual role of project manager and consultant.
That concentration of responsibilities effectively removed independent supervision and made it easier to certify payments without reliable verification of on‑site progress[an2] , a structural engineer familiar with such work, confided to us but asked for anonymity.
Despite payments amounting to nearly the full contract value, construction stalled at around 70 percent when the technical report was conducted, before later ticking to the 76 percent, where it is now stuck.
CBC managing director Tony Farias said there has been no activity on site since early 2024, attributing it to lack of funding.
The technical report corroborates long periods of inactivity: it records seven months of dormancy—from April to November 2019—caused by design issues, yet shows three interim payment certificates (IPCs) were certified during that zero‑activity period, a development the structural engineer said was an anomaly.
Near‑total payment for minimal work
Contract rules require the contractor to prepare IPCs detailing completed work, with the project manager verifying those claims. On this project, however, IPCs 03–24 were prepared not by CBC, but by a quantity surveyor in the project manager’s office—a clear breach of protocol. CBC prepared only the first two IPCs, the report says.
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