Editorial: May budget deliberations begin in earnest

Parliament in Malawi is tasked with legislative powers and the Government with executive. The key participants in the budgetary process are Parliament, the Government, precisely the Ministry of Finance, the spending agencies of the national budget, the taxpayers and the National Auditing Office. 

The budget is arguably the government’s most important policy tool. As a result, legislatures in both developed and developing democracies are seeking to strengthen their role in the budget process. A number of donors have focused on the budget as a policy tool for advancing welfare of Malawians, by supporting pro-poor reviews of national budgets.

Budgetary oversight and scrutiny can be an important component of efforts to deal with government abuse and corruption. Active and effective public accounts committees and legislative audit bodies can improve government fiscal accountability, as well as increase the value for money of government expenditures.  

However, there are a number of challenges in supporting an increased role for parliament in the budget process. In Malawi there have been no limitations on the budget authority of parliament, particularly with respect to proposing amendments that would increase spending but now with the ruling party commanding a two-third majority, this is sure to change. In our context (last five years), there has been pressure to provide budgetary resources to members of parliament for development projects, which can raised patronage issues.  

Despite these challenges, there are numerous examples where increased capacity for budgetary analysis and review has helped strengthen the legislature as an institution. Strengthening legislative involvement in the budget process can increase the role of the legislature generally and help create greater checks and balances in systems that may have been strongly dominated by the executive. In the present configuration, greater civil society involvement with parliament on budgetary issues will help compensate for limited legislative capacity for fiscal analysis and review. 

Since independence, the Executive has been preparing and drawing up the budget. During the preparation of the budget, the major role is played by the Ministry of Finance, while the role of Parliament is negligible, except for the past five years, although at the beginning of the planning and preparation of the budget there are the greatest opportunities for exerting an influence on the making of the decisions, which are much reduced by the time the budget appears in parliamentary procedure.

The reason for this, among other things, is the shortness of the time available for parliamentary debate on the budget, during which it is extremely difficult to change anything, since any modification at all of any of the proposed items will necessarily involve changing and adjusting the remaining items. A situation of this nature, together with the pressure of time under which the budget is most often passed, results in the budget as proposed by the Government being pushed through. It is the viewpoint of the Government that invariably wins the day in the process of drawing up the budget, since it is government objectives that are reflected in the proposal of the budget.  

In about this time of parliamentary sitting, the national budget proposal is debated. In most cases the amount of the money that is allocated to individual spending agencies is inadequate, and the debate tends to be a way of putting forward the explanations and wishes of individual representatives, who are lobbying for their own ministry, constituency or interest groups.

The Finance Minister gives the draft budget (with the accompanying proposal of the law) to all the working bodies of Parliament and all the members for their consideration. At sittings of Parliament and the committees, the budget is debated, and the programmes and fiscal policy proposed by the Government are analysed. After consideration, the working bodies shape their proposals into concrete amendments, in accordance with the draft national budget and the final draft for the execution of the national budget. The Committee on Budget and Finance and on the Legal Affairs and other interested working bodies of Parliament, after reviewing and debating the budget proposal, submit their report to the Finance Minister.

Since less attention is paid to professional informed opinion than to the party whip, which is crucial for the making of all economic and political decisions, there is much justice in the opinion that the parliamentary debates about economic problems are attended with inadequate professionalism and expertise. If during the year the budget is not balanced, Parliament can theoretically undertake direct measures. Practice, however, shows that Parliament accepts the proposals of the Government without taking any responsibility upon itself. 

Parliament and the parliamentary committees at the budget debates analyses the Government’s budget proposal. Although Parliament may modify the budget proposal, practice shows that most of the items in the budget as proposed by the Government are voted in by Parliament and obtain the force of law in unchanged form. 

We may thus say that Parliament is poorly informed, which, together with the absence of any earlier negotiations of Government and Parliament, is at odds with one of the budgetary principles, that of the provision of information.

From what has been said so far, we may conclude that during the preparation of the budget, Parliament has almost no influence at all, while during the budgetary debate it has a key role. But although Parliament may alter the Government’s budget bill, in reality, most of the Government’s budgetary items go into force in unchanged shape after the parliamentary debate. All this happens because of the majority of the votes that the ruling party has in Parliament, because of the members. 

This time around, Malawi as liberal democracy with a minority opposition should look to the civil society as the best way to satisfy the private, cultural and communitarian preferences of minorities, as well as majorities.  

For an improvement of the legislative phase of the budgetary process, among other things, we suggest an improvement in the work and efficiency of the Budget and Finance Committee by increasing its capacity and collaboration with various non-governmental experts; additionally work on the expertise and level of information of MPs and the parliamentary office staff because understanding budgetary matters requires a particular kind of knowledge and quality information.

In order to obtain true and accurate budgetary information, private information and connections are often used; we also suggest an improvement in the communication between the Ministry of Finance and Parliament and Budget and Finance Committee.

The committee should be kept informed of the course of the budgetary progress and even before the bill has arrived in Parliament, the Ministry of Finance ought to inform the Committee in camera concerning the premises of the next budget and the outline items so that the Committee should be able to work more qualitatively on the budgetary proposal.  

Apart from that all the other MPs could also be informed of this, because sittings of the Committee are not held in camera especially where such importance matters as the budget are concerned; we also suggest that the Secretariat of Parliament should increase the resources for the additional employment of extra consultants in the Committee and Parliament and the further professional training of the Parliament’s Staff Service.

As the consultants of the Committee mostly belong to the technical staff with economy-oriented education, they should be additionally trained and new legal experts should be employed in order to facilitate the drafting of legislation; Additionally educate MPs about the budgetary issues, to introduce the Internet and Intranet for all MPs in order to facilitate and speed up their work, which primarily relies on information. This would help in reducing the need for travelling, as MPs would be able to perform their work in their own constituencies in a more efficient and cost-effective way.

Besides, Members of Parliament should also be educated in the basic IT concepts. The computerisation of the parliament is praiseworthy, but it also has created additional problems (due to difficulties in insufficient skills on the part of MPs). We also suggest an imposition of some kind of financial sanctions for representatives (allowance reductions, for example), who fail to attend the meetings of the House in order to improve the discipline and efficiency of the Parliament work. 

With this insight, we are confident that members and other stakeholders will see for themselves the parliament’s role in the budget process and focus on the way in which the budget is being used as a form of issue-based assistance to improve the parliament’s oversight and representative roles.

Tagged with: budget, parliament

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