More budget transparency encouraged

Ogone Tlhage - Despite ranking well when it comes to transparency regarding its budget, Namibian authorities can still do better to improve the information contained in the budget documents that are seen by members of the public, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) director Graham Hopwood.An Open Budget Index compiled showed that Namibia’s score was better than the global average, attracting a score of 50. Namibia also compared favourably to Malawi, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, which attracted far lower scores.“Namibia’s score is in part affected by the change in definition of publicly available information which from the Open Budget Survey done in 2017 only recognises those documents that are published online on the relevant body’s official website as available to the public,” Hopwood said.He also felt that the ministry of finance had been inconsistent in the documents made available to the public.He acknowledged that although the availability of budget information had improved, the ministry of finance had decreased the availability of budget information by failing to publish a Citizens’ Budget and failing to produce an audit report.“Moreover, Namibia has failed to make progress by not producing a pre-budget statement and by publishing in-year reports that only contain scant budget information and do not provide information on topics such as expenditure by classification or by revenue by category or by source,” Hopwood said.Hopwood encouraged the government to pilot mechanisms for members of the public and executive branch officials to exchange views on national budget matters during formulation of the national budget and its implementation.Legislative hearingsHopwood also suggested legislative hearings on the formulation of the budget, during which members of the public or civil society organisations can testify.According to the technical adviser to the minister of finance, Penda Iithindi, efforts were made to take into consideration public opinion into the budget.“With regard to public consultation there are three categories of consultation on the budget,” he said.He explained that these are the pre-budget statement public consultations in November of every year which serve as public input in the main budget formulation, consultations with industry and professional bodies and post-budget public engagements.Ithindi also explained that most of the regional programmes are budgeted after consultations with the local and regional authorities who identify the beneficiaries, which according to him is a participatory process.“While we will be making use of some information generated by the survey, the survey should as well generate information that satisfies the national policies and not the survey motives,” he said. - Additional reporting by Nampa

More budget transparency encouraged

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