By Samwel Muhindo, KAMPALA
Uganda
Uganda State House spends approximately Shs 2.8 billion ($759,531) daily, a record of its financial year (FY) and supplementary budget allocations between 2016/2017 and 2022/23 reveals.
Merged budget allocations to
State House have progressively increased from Shs 497bn in 2019 to Shs 857bn in
2020 and Shs 1.02 trillion in 2021. In April and October 2020, State House
received two supplementary budget allocations worth Shs 90 billion and Shs
450bn respectively.
The latter was on top of the
Shs 407bn that State House had been allocated hardly three months after the
start of 2020/21 financial year. On the flip side, several other key ministries
and agencies of the economy continue to endure decreasing budgets.
In fact, the national budget
framework paper for FY 2023/24 reports significant budget cuts. Sources privy
to the cuts attributed the budget cuts to the absence of money which some
economists have blamed on the government’s ostentatious lifestyle that has
affected service delivery.
For instance, in the next
financial year, Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI) shall receive Shs 29bn,
representing a 54.5 percentage decrease. Uganda records approximately 35,000
new cases of cancer and 25,000 deaths associated with cancer annually.
During the October 20, 2020
parliamentary session that approved the Shs 3.8 trillion supplementary budget,
MPs questioned the Shs 450bn to State House. Nathan Nandala-Mafabi, the
Budadiri West MP, questioned the classified expenditure allocation.
“Is State House buying guns?
What is it going to use Shs 200 billion for? What is that classified
information which cannot be found in the ministries of Internal Affairs and
Defence or the Uganda Police Force? What is this Shs 200 billion plus the other
Shs 250 billion, which makes it Shs 450 billion? Is it a matter of just
appropriating money just for the sake of it? This is disastrous for this
country,” Mafabi said.
Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda, the
Kira MP, noted that funding for the supplementary is indicated as “additional
borrowing”. “We are borrowing to give State House Shs 450bn! (..) My
understanding is that State House is the residence of the president. The
president’s children have grown and got married; so, they are no longer there.
This State House has become the biggest consumer of our budget - Shs 450bn for
State House on top of the Shs 600bn that we passed here,” he said.
In a recent interview
with The Observer, Julius Mukunda, the executive director of the
Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group (CSBAG), said Uganda’s budget process lacks
proper planning and prioritization of resources for expenditure.
“Agriculture, the backbone of
Uganda’s economy, is allocated Shs 1.2 trillion while State House is allocated
one trillion shillings. This is just a question of poor planning. A serious
government would ensure that more resources are channelled through agriculture
because it has a multiplier effect,” Mukunda said.
To run away from the budgeting
process, Mukunda said most government agencies no longer budgeted for their
core mandates in anticipation of supplementary budgets as classified
expenditures.
“Ninety per cent of the money
that we spend doesn’t qualify to be supplementary budgets. A supplementary
budget should be unavoidable but almost everyone now needs a supplementary budget.
Since supplementary budgets distort the entire planning process, they should be
for emergencies only. There’s no expense in a budget that requires a
supplementary budget. These are planned-for expenses that can always be
considered in the financial year budget,” Mukunda said.
In their June, 2022 report to
understand the government’s fondness for supplementary budgets, Alliance for
Finance Monitoring, a nongovernmental organization that follows money in
politics, reported that the government of Uganda had appropriated four
supplementary budgets worth Shs 9.138 trillion ($2.538 billion) between
November 2021 and May 2022.
“The known secret for the
large appetites for supplementary is that the conditions governing the
appropriation of the supplementary budgets are less stringent. Most of the
questionable items are embedded under supplementary budgets. When supplementary
budgets are used to finance fixed costs like paying salaries, renting office
space etc than being used for capital investment, they have zero impact on the
GDP growth,” their report read in part. – Observer
No comments:
Post a Comment