Is it worth it?

Being in the development business can be frustrating, even more so when, for all your good work, nothing actually changes.

Picture a naughty child, whose playroom is forever a jumble of toys. To the outsider the playroom looks like a dreadful mess, though to the child that doesn’t matter one bit. Parents regularly give lectures to the child, but, though he may tidy up now and again, nothing really changes.  Bring in Supernanny (those who’ve seen the TV show will know how she brings children to heel in a matter of days, and everyone lives happily thereafter), to give the child encouragement and clear guidance about what needs doing.

I hope the Congolese Government won’t be offended by the parallel, but that’s just what’s been happening with the Government finances. After years of chaos, Supernanny (The IMF, the World Bank, the EU, Britain and France) brings in a team of highly experienced experts. They set up new budget systems, new tax structures and new expenditure controls. There are full time advisers in The Bank of Congo, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Budget. The first such adviser, from the IMF, started nine years ago, so everyone’s had plenty of time to get used to the idea of financial reform and modern management methods. They can now proudly point to the fact that the annual budget is now properly presented and analysed.

But . . . that’s theory. What about reality? The 2012 budget, which was ready for submission to Parliament in October last year, was only adopted by Parliament in July 2012, thus giving spending departments, in the first seven months of the year, carte blanche to spend what they liked. Why the delay? The members of Parliament were too busy campaigning for the elections in October and November last year to bother about the budget. And this year, it took five months to form a new Government and just as long to get Parliamentary timetables back on track.

But even if there had been a budget would it have made a difference? The 2011 budget was passed in good time, so no one could claim that it didn’t exist. But what they could do was to use the procedure for emergencies under which expenditure may be made even though it is not budgeted. And in 2011 the country experienced so many so-called emergencies that 47.5% of the budget was spent using that excuse. And if you analyse which Ministries had to face the most emergencies it was, of course, the offices of the President and the Prime Minister. Emergencies such as having to induce people to vote for them, maybe?

The neat thing about the Congolese budget is that individual Ministries have their own sources of funds – taxation which they can levy directly from the public. These funds are supposed to go directly into the national treasury, but the Ministries concerned have no intention of allowing that. So the funds are kept off-budget, and used as a personal slush fund for patronage by the Minister, and salary supplements for him and his senior staff.

The situation has not been helped by the fact that, in an effort to reduce corruption and other offences, the government invented a truly Kafka-esque system for the approval of payments. The total number of actions required to pay a government bill was, until very recently, 120. You can imagine that there is every incentive to bypass that process, if you can use your own Ministry funds and just pay friends and family directly for services received. Even though this process has now been reduced to 20 steps, there’s still every incentive to ignore the system.

Anyway, that’s all going to end soon. A new report prepared by Supernanny has detailed all this malfeasance and described in detail the liberties which have been taken with the system. We have every confidence that its recommendations will be adopted and implemented with enthusiasm within the next six months. Every confidence??