By Ramatoulie Jawo
The National Assembly Member for Nianija constituency, Hon Amadou Camara, in his intervention during the 2023 budget debate, suggested that performance of government sectors should be looked into before they are allocated resources.
“We should start looking at the performances of various sectors every year before allocating resources to them. I will take the Ministry of Health as an example, looking at the health budget, which consumed almost a billion plus every year in the resources of the government. A large percentage of that is going into salaries and wages. The unfortunate thing is that we are not doing a performance review, with regard to how the money is spent, making their budgetary allocation difficult,” he said.
The Nianija MP argued that there is a need to move away from the current budgetary process. He acknowledges that it is good that people’s salaries as well as allowances are getting paid, but says it’s also important, they start prioritizing other things in the budgeting process.
“National Assembly select Committees have a greater task to play on this part and as far as the Ministry of Health is concern, the Health Committee and the Social Sectors. We will really need to step in to make sure that we do some of these reviews and wait for the course of the year. Before the Budget period comes to see where we can prioritize in some of the allocation of the resources,” he said.
Hon. Camara lamented that if they don’t prioritize the process, the people putting the budget together will keep on repeating some of the same allocation of resources year over year, which he says results in “very unnecessary” and redundant allocations.
Hon Camara made these remarks at the National Assembly while debating on the 2023 budget speech which was tabled by the Honorable Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs on Friday 2nd December 2022.