Controller of Budget: Sh300bn budget cut order hampered service delivery
Controller of Budget Margaret Nyakang’o. President William Ruto’s order to ministries and public agencies to cut spending by Sh300 billion may have come at a huge cost to service delivery for citizens, the CoB has warned.
President William Ruto’s order to ministries and public agencies to cut spending by Sh300 billion may have come at a huge cost to service delivery for citizens, the Controller of Budget (CoB) has warned.
The CoB, in the national government budget implementation review report for July to December 2022, revealed that the move caused the locking of the government’s official procurement system, denying access to ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) planning to procure goods and services.
The report shows that to limit MDAs from further spending, the government locked the Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS), which all government agencies are required to use in the procurement of goods and services, and this ended up hindering service delivery.
“To limit MDAs from further spending, the IFMIS was ‘locked’, pending approval of the first supplementary budget. As such, there was no access to IFMIS, negatively affecting MDAs’ budget implementation, especially procurement of goods and services,” the report observes.
The CoB cautions that while supplementary budgeting is permissible, the process should not interfere with the implementation of an approved budget.
CoB Margaret Nyakang’o recommends that the supplementary budget—currently before Parliament—be expedited and approved to unlock the stalemate, as she termed the issue of “prolonged closure of IFMIS” a concern.
The government locked IFMIS even as it went ahead to propose a Sh106 billion reduction in the development budget in the current financial year while raising recurrent spending by Sh93 billion, according to the supplementary budget.
This beats the objective of ordering the Sh300 billion budget spending when President Ruto entered office, whose aim was to rationalise spending by cutting non-essential expenditures in favour of development projects.
