We have, in the past few months, seen and heard reports in both electronic and print media about “lapses” adherence to established procedure and general financial regulations within the public service.
Reports about the utilization of funds in the National Disaster Management Fund, for activities of the Directorate of Intelligence Services; concerns of how funds’ exceeding the set limit was authorized, to purchase household items for ministers, and other related issues, seem to be gaining prominence in the media.
These brings to the fore concerns as to whether, within the public service, there are adequate controls and enforcement mechanisms to ensure that those public officials, who are accounting officers for the use of public funds, do follow the laid down procedures and act as expected. I need to point out that by public officials I refer to both elected and appointed officials in the form of politicians and public servants respectively.
In any organizational setup, agencies and individuals are assigned accounting responsibilities and even given the broad parameters under which they could exercise discretion on how financial regulations can or cannot be waived or simply ignored.
The same system will also set in place the required standards and resulting penalties accounting officers can expect to face, in the event they neglect their duties.
The recent reports would seem to suggest that there is ambiguity as to firstly, what to do on matters pertaining to the expenditure of some items that ministers/politicians are presumably entitled to, even though it would also seem clear, from same reports, that there are procedures put in place that stipulate a set of processes/procedures and specific activities that have to be performed on such matters, Secondly, there also seem to be “confusion” as to who is the accounting officer, at whose desk the ultimate responsibility ends.
One of the virtues of any governmental setting that has principles of accountability, transparency and ethical conduct by public officials as its core business, would have a very functional and regulatory system that clearly spells out the limits and intent of its financial regulations and procedures.
It is even more important that such a system entails an existence of very functional and enforceable control and monitoring mechanisms that actualizes the intended adherence to these principles by public officials.
It is certainly not enough to have fingers pointing in all directions without pinning a particular officer down as the one to account when certain decisions may have been taken by others who though responsible, may not be accountable as procedure dictates.
This is even more crucial in our system where ministries are at one level led by politicians in the form of ministers and at another level there is a whole hierarchy of public servants (headed by the Permanent Secretaries) who could be accounting officers.
I want to believe that our public service policies and procedures are very clear as to accounts when and where and in my opinion; there should be no room for vacillation when it comes to spelling out how much should be spent and on what; neither should there be confusion as to who should authorize either expending or virement of funds from one fund to the other.
I want to believe that these procedures are well known and have been in place for quite a long time in the public service and, therefore there is no excuse as to why we should be seeing or experiencing some of the recent incidents on expending public funds, as reported in the media.
Accounting officers are expected to be firm, decisive and very thorough when they make financial decisions, particularly on the use of public funds. It is worrying when there are insinuations that ministers might have acted outside their powers to authorize virement of funds from a “special emergency fund” a project whose expenditure has been approved through the normal process.
It is equally worrying when reports of over expending funds are reported as though within the public service its unknown as to who is the accounting officer.
In all situations of authorization of the use of public funds there is always that officer on whose desk the bug stops and these are the people to be grilled and/or vindicated by the Public Accounts Committee. I do hope that we are now beginning to see a blaring of lines of judgment and even duplication of accountability responsibilities amongst and between elected and appointed public officials.
Let’s remember that our elected officials or ministers are part of the legislative organ of government that has ultimate authority on public expenditure and their involvement (if any) at the level of detailed utilization of same funds at levels of purchasing and item selection would be an unfortunate development.
I honestly, wish this is not what we are experiencing in the manner in which recent reports seem to present this scenario.
When the legislative organ approves both appropriation and authority to spend public funds, they do so with very explicit ceilings set on various expenditures of programmes.
It would not be expected that some of them could later on be party to variation of the same approved ceilings, particularly in a manner that would suggest they are acting outside the realm of their responsibility and more importantly trespassing in some other public officer’s accountability duties. Any minute semblance of this occurrence would be an affront on the virtues of a public service entrenched on ethical and moral conduct strongly anchored by observance of all the principles of good governance. If you believe a non existent or thinly drawn line between politics and administration, then good governance becomes a generic application within both the political and administrative aspects of a functional and democratic government.
I hope the recent reports as mentioned earlier are been addressed to either re-entrench the value and intent of the need to account for the decisions taken on the use of public funds, or if they have been gaps in the control and actualization of measures to instill discipline, then we are equally updating our systems such that we will have less of similar reports emanating from the public service.
We could do better with more focused accounting in the public service, no multiple sources of neglect or dereliction of duties.
