Public Sector Management
One of the
major challenges facing public financial management in Ghana is unreliable, irregular
and insufficient flow of funds from finance ministry to other ministries and
their agencies and departments. The other challenge is expenditure on
irrelevant and non-prioritized items induced either by the public management
system or by indiscretion or indeed incompetence and rent-seeking. In the case of Hon. Haruna Iddrisu (MP for
Tamale South and Employment & Labour Relations’ Minister), the nature of
the public financial management system of Ghana may have bugged him down in
respect of the over a million Ghana cedis paid for membership dues and trip of
16 people or so to ILO Conference out of the coffers of Youth and Employment
Agency (YEA) of Ghana.
Dilemma
Apparently,
the ministry of employment and labour relations was starved of cash and, so as
a solace, Haruna Iddrisu succeeded to use the 'law' and ‘inappropriate best
practice in the public sector' to, at all cost, find funds in order to meet
Ghana's international legal obligations - the result of which was to
unfortunately take funds from an agency not only in its formative stages and
targeting the despondent and frustrated youth but also that which had been
tainted with corruption scandals. Hon Haruna Iddrisu should have known better
and acted differently even under desperation.
But then, where was he to get the money to
meet Ghana's obligations? Could he have denied Ghana's participation in ILO
conference and also deferred payment of dues? Yes, he could have done that but
what would have been the ramifications, especially so when President Mahama was
scheduled to be a guest speaker or so of the conference?
But was it a must for
President John Mahama to agree to be a guest speaker in the conference if he
was told that the ministry of labour had no funds to sponsor the trip except to
borrow from the YEA which was struggling
to survive? In the past, how many people
used to attend such a conference for Ghana?
Was spending over a million Ghana Cedis on the dues and conference a continuation of
what used to happen in the past or was this prudent and improvement or worst
scenario thereof?
Final remarks
All of
these bring us back to a self-inflicted constrained finance ministry that
appears to be out of touch with best practices of at least getting funds
released on time to meet budgetary expectations of ministries, departments and
agencies. It also tells us a weird spectacle of poor public financial
management architecture in the country.
It also reminds us of the huge amount of monies developing countries
including Ghana pay as membership dues to international organizations such as
ILO, the overall comparative benefits thereof can generally be said to be
questionable. What Haruna did may have
been lawful and authorized but it could not have been a prudent decision to
take any pesewa from YEA to attend a conference, under normal circumstances and
in the dire situation of YEA.
Honestly,
I don't think a whole government ministry (all other ministries included)
should use funds of an agency to buy vehicles for supervisory purposes. The
ministry itself should budget for such vehicles and allow the agency to budget
for its own vehicles. They each should use their released allocations to
purchase what they budgeted for. Is this
too much to ask for? Or is supervision of the agency not part of the mandate of
the ministry? What is the basis for the law allowing funds to be taken from the
agency by its ministry in discharge of the ministry’s mandate? I simply don’t
seem to get it!
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