A hard budget by a boring man
Today will see one of the regular Big Events of Parliament enacted on the floor of the House. The Minister of Finance will come to the House and present the 2015 Budget on behalf of President John Dramani Mahama.
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I shall not be listening or watching. Budget statements at the best of times do not make the most exciting reading or listening. And coming from this particular Minister of Finance, Mr Seth Terkper, at this time of economic “challenges”, it is bound to be an excruciating spectacle. He is boring and he makes the most enthusiastic of supporters doze off in the midst of his monotonous rendition.
But then I know I had better take an interest because whether I listen or not, whether I watch him or not, whether I cheer or boo him and whether I read whatever he has to present to Parliament or not, my life will be affected by the Minister’s Budget. The situation is like a saying in my language: hlↄmade kotoku, kpakpla nye dↄ, makplamakpla nye d. To non-Ewe speakers, this translates vaguely as: if you do it, trouble; if you don’t do it, trouble.
The truth is I am not boycotting the Budget because the Minister of Finance is boring. I am postponing having to deal with whatever he has to tell us because I have been reading about the last two Budgets and I fear that this, like the two previous ones might well be an exercise in futility.
I do not want to give the impression that Budget statements are my normal bedside reading. I was reading in the newspapers an account of the sitting of Justice Apau’s Judgement Debt Committee and what I read took me to the Budget.
A former Chief Director of the Gender Ministry had apparently appealed to the Committee to make the Ministry pay his outstanding entitlements to him. The current Chief Director appeared before the Committee and said the Ministry was not disputing that the former Chief Director was entitled to his claims; the Ministry had been unable to pay because they did not have the money to pay. According to him, out of the four releases of funds approved in the Budget that should have been made to the Ministry in 2013, only one release was made. He did not tell the committee what the state of releases was in 2014, but one could easily surmise that there had been no improvement on the 2013 situation.
Anyway that is what took me to the Official Report of Parliamentary Debates on the earlier Budget statements delivered to the House. A cursory reading of the sector reports of the annual estimates would show you that what happens in the ministries and departments bears no resemblance to what the Minister of Finance has indicated in his Budget.
Shortfalls
Almost every report starts with something along the lines of “the Ministry requested ten thousand Ghana cedis but was allocated eight thousand Ghana cedis”. There then follows a surreal peroration of what the Ministry intends to do in spite of the shortfall between what they requested and what has been allocated to them.
If you persist and read further you discover the ridiculous degenerates into the absurd. The Ministry is lucky if 6000 of the GH¢8,000 that has been allocated to the Ministry is disbursed until it is time for another Budget. Then there is another round of rigmarole of a new Budget statement, shortfall between request and allocation and an even more dramatic shortfall between allocation and release.
One Honourable Member employed a Latin term used in commercial law to try and explain the state of affairs: nemo dat quod non habet, What you do not have, you cannot give. In other words, the Ministry of Finance doesn’t have the money and therefore it cannot give it.
I had learnt from the newspaper that the Gender Ministry had only one of four releases that they had been allocated in the Budget and I quickly discovered from the Parliamentary Debates that they were not the only ones facing the predicament.
Let me cite the example of the Ministry of Education. According to the Ranking Member of the Education Committee, the shortfall between what the Ministry had requested and what had been allocated to the Ministry in the 2014 Budget meant that 94per cent of the Ministry’s Budget would go towards compensation, that is, paying staff. The Ranking Member then states that as of October, only 13 per cent of the 2013 budget for the GETFund had been released.
Let me quote his exact words here: “In November and December, we are preparing a new budget, whereas in the previous budget, only 13 per cent was given to this agency to support the Ministry’s and agencies’ activities. So what budget are we presenting? Are we presenting budget for budget sake?”
Indeed, the question needs to be asked again and again. If what is presented in the Budget is not reflected in how money is used, then what is the point of the whole exercise? If money is allocated to a department but is not released and if money is given to some other agencies and organisations that do not show on the Budget, then what is the point of the whole exercise? If the Ministry of Finance does not have the money, why does the Minister go through the charade of “allocating” it?
But then of course, a Budget does not involve only expenditure items. The Minister has to tell us how and where he is proposing to find revenue.
It is this part of the Budget that used to be interesting; everybody wants to know what new taxes the Minister will be imposing. I have tried to second guess the Honourable Minister. The rumour is that he is going to put VAT on petroleum products. Will that fill the hole in the Budget… I doubt it, but he will certainly upset many people. I don’t see many people smoking these days and so if he raises taxes on cigarettes it is not likely to help fill the troublesome hole.
Now that the IMF people are in town and are said to be looking over all our figures with a fine tooth comb, my suspicion is that it is going to be a hard Budget. A hard Budget, read by a boring man will not a make an interesting day in Parliament.