Sierra Leone News: Le450B in unpaid bills affects 2017 budget execution

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Three years of unpaid bills has left a debt of Le450 billion on the country, which has made the 2017 budget difficult to execute. Senior Budget Management Officer at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MoFED), Gbessay Swarray, said, “From 2013 they have been accumulating arrears which has been making budget executions very difficult the following year. We accumulated over Le450 billion in debt. We have to deal with those arrears. If we continue like that there will be a time the budget will just be a wishful thought.” Swarray said as a result of this problem they went to the Consultative Africa Budget Reform Initiative (CABRI) training in South Africa, and their Change Management Team (CMT) decided to approach the problem collectively. “Some MDAs do not constitute a budget committee. An individual or a group of people just sit down, prepare documents and bring it to the Ministry of Finance as their budget. Before they start executing that particular budget another program manager comes in with an activity that is very vital, so they start spending outside the budget, which ultimately leads to overruns,” he said. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was selected because they are going above their budget. “We selected them so that they can have a view of how the budget is planned so that they will not make the mistakes other MDAs are making,” Swarray said. The nine MDAs were monitored during their preparation of their 2018 budget, and it was noted that some of them complied and some promised to bring their budget committee meeting minutes, the Ministry is still following up on them. Commenting on the budget formulation, Deputy Inspector General of Police, Richard Moigbe, they receive their ceiling and they make sure that they prioritise the security needs. “We know the global recession, security is not cheap and even when we are given a ceiling we work within it and go and defend it, and Finance will say go back and prioritise, I am not here to blame them because they too have some limitations as the budget is too small.” However they go back and think what activity to remove, “do we remove chasing armed robbers? So that people can sleep quietly, or training or recruitment, sometimes they let us go with what we want, but this has been a challenge but for us as every activity is important” he said. He said that their budget is increasing every year, because security is dynamic, “it does not remain constant, they responsibilities are increasing daily emerging security issues.” “With the elections coming and new emerging communities, the attrition has swollen to about 4,000, we need to increase our manpower for the election. All of these will go alongside the normal police work. That is why the budget is going to increase. We are going to ask for more next year and we are going to justify it.” Col. Sahid Tejan Kanu, Director of Operations at the Ministry of Defense, said, “Defense is an expensive business, it is not cheap we have to have a realistic budget that can support our operations, what is causing us to ask for extra money over our budget is the issue of budget ceiling, it is always good to have control measures, but it needs to be reasonable and just.” He prevailed on the Ministry to be very careful on how they allocate ceilings, and advised that a good take off point could be, to look at the critical activity of each MDA before a cut-off point is provided, “the security of defense business cannot be predicted.” ZJ/6/9/17 By Zainab Joaque Thursday September 07, 2017.

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