Doha Abdelhamid* calls for much needed public accountability in national budgeting The state's credibility is now at stake after the series of staggering public announcements on the minimum wage level, taxation, subsidisation and pensions. All such announcements lacked a vision on where we are, where we want to be, when and how. The state, which is supposedly citizen-serving, is not used to, and does not seem to have a genuine political will to incorporate citizens' needs into the national budget. The decentralisation of the state budget that was covering press headlines for some time already, realised limited progress so far. In both developing and developed countries, transparency and social dialogue relating to the state budget are driven by the pursuit of public accountability, democratic reforms, presidential electoral programmes, multi-stakeholder participation for meeting citizens basic needs, need to join agglomerations (such as the EU, OECD etc.), and is the cause and effect of parliamentary calls moving along the same direction. At the turn of the millennium, Egypt was not far from achieving a success story in building the capacity of officials of the government administrative units towards state public expenditure, resource management effectiveness, and programme- based budgeting. Nine key ministries and 13 pilot administrative units within were at the forefront of success. Around 1,585 government employees were trained and completed results-oriented budgets in Egypt with full faith and credit. The fiscal reform effort was halted by the abrupt government shuffle leading to the notorious Tora prison Cabinet starting mid-2004. The purpose of the new approach to budget preparation and implementation adopted prior to the mentioned Cabinet shuffle focused on ensuring wide-ranging participation, monitoring and evaluation of fiscal and development policies, goals and objectives and setting indicators to citizens' satisfaction of public service delivery levels according to their identified priorities. Egypt was acknowledged world-wide as a success story for its realisation of rolling, results-oriented budgeting within an impressive span of 17 months, and many countries in the Arab world took it exemplary. The Cabinet shuffle and the halt of the programme flipped the success story to sudden failure. In order to camouflage corruptive behaviour, constrict public accountability, continue with budget opaqueness, and due to lack of sufficient knowledge, the implementation of results-oriented budgeting after then was claimed complex. Those claims came at a time while discarding the success acknowledged and the faith of the government's employees' pilots which drove them to proceed with their own latent efforts and limited resources to date for the sake of their patriotic feeling for the country and its people. Results-oriented budgets require a vision that is currently lacking. That vision should have clear-cut development goals, multi- year and multi-level performance indicators, accountable officers, appropriate incentive mechanisms, continuously generated evaluative evidence reporting (data and information), and fiscal accountability acts. At the moment, the state is infringing articles 1 and 14 of its Budget Law 87/2005 stipulating the preparation and implementation of results-oriented budgeting since the beginning of the fiscal year fiscal year 2010/11. And, now we start a new budget (FY2011/12) with the same input-based pattern that lacks all the ingredients mentioned above. The budget that started on 1 July 2011 continues to be shameless, and without a socio-economic development orientation compliant with the good practice in budget preparation and implementation in the world around us -- that is to say, a blind-folded, aimless state budget. Time is ripe for the Higher Council of the Armed Forces and Cabinet of Ministers to take note, enforce and revive the results-oriented budgeting efforts, rely on the embedded domestic human capacities, rebuild and maintain the performance culture within the state apparatus and society, sustain the reform intervention irrespective of political changes and Cabinet shuffles, embed commitment clearly and stipulate austere punitive measures for defrayers and share progress results with the public and civil society (not the private sector only), and finally reverse the puzzling perception about the success/failure flip-flop story of Egypt's effort towards results-oriented budgeting. Once this succeeds to see the light, a new vision for a sensible pay, pensions, subsidy and taxation structures geared towards citizens' satisfaction, social equity, accountability and socio-economic development, will have evolved to the satisfaction of the majority of, if not all, Egyptians. * The writer is professor of financial economics, Cape Breton University. E-mail: [email protected].
