Unimplementable budgets not worth the effort

It is government budgeting season again in the East African Community (EAC) nations for the 2020/21 financial year, which officially commences on July 1, 2020.
In the case of Tanzania, the minister for Finance and Planning, Dr Philip Mpango, kicked off the budgeting programme by briefing Parliament in the nation’s capital Dodoma on March 11 this year.
In the event, the minister presented in the National Assembly the government’s development plan and budget framework for the forthcoming financial year. These included – but were by no means limited to – the 2020/21 budgetary estimates of income (public revenues) and expenditures.  Totalling Sh34.88 trillion in all, the 2020/21 government budget translates into a five-percent increase from the Sh33.1 trillion, which was approved for the current financial year that ends on June 30, 2020.
According to  Dr Mpango – the minister’s real name; no pun intended – a goodly 37 per cent (Sh12.9 trillion) of the total budget for the coming financial year will be development expenditure in priority areas basically involving infrastructure development and industrialisation, as well as improvement of social products and services delivery.
Development projects here include the standard gauge railway (SGR) in the country’s central transport corridor, and the Nyerere hydropower project at the Stiegler’s Gorge along Rufiji River.  This is not forgetting development projects  in Education; Health; Water, etc., which were pledged by CCM in its 2015 election campaign manifesto now that this is another election year!
The other 63 per cent of the budget – Sh21.98 trillion – will be directed to recurrent expenditure ranging from public salaries to national debt repayments.
Generally speaking, increases in succeeding annual budgets – prudent though they may seem – more often than not just ‘takes care’ of inflationary pressures and currency value fluctuations from year to fiscal year, rather than finance actual development/recurrent expenditures on the ground.

Prepare budgets that are implementable
 Secondly, past experience has persistently shown that not all the funds that are budgeted by the government are disbursed in time and/or in full as ‘allocated’ in the budget books.
This is largely on account of the fact that domestic revenues rarely (if ever) meet the collection targets that are set in good faith in the first place.  As if that were not awkward enough, this shortcoming is compounded by the double whammy that the funds which are pledged by our partners-in-development – both bilateral and multilateral development partners – in the form of annual budgetary support are not always received in full and/or on time as pledged.
From the foregoing, it becomes obvious that a gazillion hurdles still remain in the government budgeting stakes. This is more so in the area of budget implementation.
As we noted in our edition of January 3, 2020, for example, the national budgetary expenditure for the 2018/19 financial year was implemented by a relatively measly 68 percent. This was according to the central Bank of Tanzania’s annual report for the year to June 30, 2019.
No! We must find ways and means of fully implementing our budgets -- starting by routinely preparing realistic, implementable budgets.