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{
    "id": 648529,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/648529/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 255,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. (Eng.) Gumbo",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 24,
        "legal_name": "Nicholas Gumbo",
        "slug": "nicholas-gumbo"
    },
    "content": "we will be insisting that ministries, departments and agencies must observe strict fidelity to the written law with regard to the fact that some compliances with the legal provisions have got all the items of budget that are being proposed here. On the review, we have noted that there is still a bit of concern with regard to austerity measures with regard to current expenditure which is still a major challenge within the Government. Where we are now, it should be possible. We should insist that the Treasury must start thinking of how they can come up with a clear, creative and economic modelling for the expenditures under transport and hospitality, so that the cost benefit analysis on all the expenditure going into these items can be easy to assess and ascertain. In addition, proposed reductions and capital expenditure by the Treasury should explain measures being taken to ensure that measures are put in place to avert the toxicity of pending bills. As the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), we are rather concerned by the fact that we continually have pending bills. The interest that is being charged on those pending bills is one of the ways that unnecessarily increase public expenditure. We had also observed that the requirement that information on the budget performance be provided is still lacking. This is one of the documents that, going forward, we must require. That is because if we do not get information on actual budget performance, it becomes difficult to ascertain the optimal levels of funding that we are going to approve here. As a House, we must have a policy to reject Supplementary Estimates in the absence of status reports on how the budget is being implemented. Our Report also speaks that there is a problem in reporting of the total amount of our foreign and external financing. In the absence of a clear report on the total amount of our foreign and external financing, it becomes very difficult to ascertain the accuracy of our indebtedness as a nation. This makes the figures that we get every year on our indebtedness as a nation to become suspect and even inaccurate. We have also observed that the Cabinet Secretary (CS) for the National Treasury claimed that there is no conciliation. In future, when submitting the Supplementary Budget, the National Treasury must provide a statement on how much has been spent as per Article 221 for each vote of the programme. In paragraph 25, the Committee noted that there is segmented construction of buildings across Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), and that has delayed the completion of construction of buildings. One of the aspects of our system of governance is that the Ministry of Roads, Public Works and Transport has been vilified unnecessarily. As a country, we need to have one point of coordination of construction of public buildings."
}