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{
    "id": 1213840,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1213840/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 211,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Bonchari, UPA",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Charles Onchoke",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "The key principles of public financial management are transparency, openness, accountability, and prudence or frugality. They are well underscored or underlined in Article 201 of our Constitution. However, our Consolidated Fund Services Management is quite the antithesis of these two principles. We are going to see many inefficiencies and rot in this part of public finance management. Article 95(4)(c) of the Constitution gives this House power of oversight over national revenue and expenditure. For all this to have gone on without oversight is a big failure on this House. Oversight was not exercised. This Committee was created at the right time to correct some of those wrongs. I stand here as someone who worked in the Ministry of Finance, and in this department, I have some insight of what goes on there. The contribution of pending bills or non-performing loans is contributed by guarantees and actual expenditures incurred. However, they are not reflected in our books because of the cash method of accounting. In other words, what we are reporting as our expenditures in our books is grossly understated. Therefore, I think the measures recommended by this Committee are to enable us correct this anomaly, so that we can deal with accounting officers who authorise expenditures when they do not have budget lines. They hold money for pensioners who have worked for a long time and wait for their money yet it is deducted and remitted every month. How come they do not receive this money at the time they are due for pension payment? I think it is wrong. It is immoral. It should not happen in this country. Whether we have inefficiencies or whatever is happening in the Pensions Department, I think they should have corrected it by this time and stage of development. I do not think we have taken an accurate inventory of our debt stock. On the manner in which we incur public debt, Parliament has not exercised its oversight role properly. The accounting officers find themselves in a situation where they go to the market to borrow without seeking the approval of Parliament. Therefore, they have put us in this situation. In addition to what has been recommended in the Report, there should be something to the effect of sanctioning the officers who put us in this situation because this happens year in year out and we dig ourselves deeper into debt. The report that we receive from the Government every year does not show the accurate financial position of Government books because of the manner in which the accounting systems have been adopted by the Government. Therefore, as a matter of urgency, we should move and require that the Treasury adopts an accrual basis of accounting because that will give us an accurate position of where we are at as far as our finances are concerned. When we have agreements where we incur external debt and work takes a long time before it starts, in the meantime, the debts cannot be disbursed because the counterpart funds have not been made available to start incurring penalties if the contract has been awarded. We incur costs which we should not be incurring in the first place because of our inefficiencies. A case in point is where I come from in Bonchari, the Ahero-Isebania Road… Please, can I have a minute, Hon. Temporary Speaker?"
}