The House Chairperson of Committee at the National Assembly, Mr Cedric Frolick, addressed the Southern African Development Community Organisation of Public Accounts Committees (SADCOPAC) on behalf of the Speaker, who couldn’t make it due to a prior commitment of the CPA Conference in Ghana. He urged the delegates at the SADCOPAC conference currently underway in Durban to empower each other to ensure that public funds are properly spent, accounted for and meet their objectives.
He also called for the conference to be used as a tool to take stock of SADCOPAC progress and challenges, as several developmental challenges emanating from the sustainable development goals have not yet been met. Notable achievements in reducing child mortality rate and extending universal health care, but much still needs to be done to achieve gender parity.
He pointed out that some countries are unlikely to meet the deadline for achieving the sustainable development goals of 2030 and that poor public financial management practices, including fruitless and wasteful expenditure and underspending of budgets are compounding the problem and impacting on the poor disproportionally.
If these poor public finance management practices ae to be allowed to persist, democracy will come under increasing pressure, he maintained. “People would start to ask why must we vote when schools are not refurbished, but left to fall apart, and when services are not delivered.” In his view, “It is this lack of responsiveness by public representatives that leads public protests.”
He further urged delegates at the conference to ensure that they not only ratify resolutions, but devise strategies to implement them. This conference will mean nothing without any tangible outputs and will be nothing more than wasteful expenditure he claimed. To avoid this, conference delegates should ask themselves hard questions, including interrogating the constraints they operate under and how to overcome them.
He also criticised a growing trend for government departments to focus on achieving clean audits, “when in actual fact the quality of the services they deliver is not clean at all” and citizens’ quality of life do not improve. He also urged conference delegates to ensure that statutory bodies such as the office of the Auditor General conduct their work without interference, fear or favour.
Another issue Mr Frolick asked delegates to think about was how they would make the public aware of the resolutions from this conference and how the issues discussed will become part of the legislative sector agendas in their respective countries. It is also important for conference delegates to consider how they can sharpen existing oversight methodologies and find new instruments for financial oversight and analysis that will “cause disruption”, he said, particularly among “your own political party members most of whom are allergic to be held accountable.”
Abel Mputing
2 October 2023
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