Budgeted Corruption: A Societal Scourge and A Syndicated Evil.

World over, planning and formulating of a working budget, falls in the ambit of the technical team, though the political side may originate ideas that address the promises enshrined in the ruling party’s manifesto or working paper.

The technical team translates the political aspirations of the ruling class into facts and figures. The dichotomy here is that each of these sides looks at this document through different lenses. Whereas the political class may genuinely wish to use the budget as an engine for national transformation, the technical team sees an opportunity to feather their nest by manipulating the figures crippling the execution of the manifesto made by the political class. It is the art of manipulation.

The two sides are diametrically skewed against each other in terms of budget outcome. This unfortunate phenomenon does not stop at public budgeting, but also private entities and international organisations that advance loans, development partners that give donor funding for projects, contractors, quantity surveyors etc.

Recently, the president revealed that some MPs connived with the technical staff of Ministry of Finance to inflate the figures for personal aggrandizement. This is just a microcosm of what generally happens in government entities and society as a whole. During bidding time, the bidders are given privileged information by the technical staff . This phenomena mostly applies to situations where accounting systems are porous such that anyone with access to the budgeting process can add any amounts to suit their interests.

Corruption budgeting is both a moral and criminal undertaking that underpins the insatiate desire for primitive accumulation. The vice is spurred by the fact that sometimes politicians are not as technical as the bureaucrats. Most politicians are not well versed with figures or are greenhorns in matters of budgeting so even if figures are inflated, it is almost impossible to detect the chicanery of the technical staff.

However, there are also scenarios where there is a direct connivance between the politicians and technical staff, a case in point is the recent revelation by the president of how MPs have been inflating the budget in cahoots with the Ministry of Finance technocrats. Ordinarily, the budgeting process that would involve departmental estimates, budget conferencing, alignment, presentation, reading, debate and passing would have been a collective effort of both executive and legislature, but the political class have hijacked the process.

The civil society organisations( NGOs) have also not been spared of budgeted corruption, where non-existent projects have been funded by donors or the existing ones are inflated while exploiting ignorance of foreign funders about the local dynamics. A single project can have multiple funders, leading to budgeted pilferage. It is a vice that deprives the public of much needed funds diverted into personal aggrandizement. Since these funds don’t come directly from public coffers, there is little interest in how they are utilised by the beneficiaries and hence most of the project officers are some of the opulent millionaires around courtesy of budgeted corruption.

There is a raging debate about the cost of roads in Uganda per kilometer compared to regional costs, the cost of land compensations, the time factor of project execution. Different technocrats give varying reasons to justify the exorbitant costs, citing topography, wetlands and design. But the bottom line is that all this is to justify budgeted corruption.

Since the staff are too technical, it is hard to challenge them on technical grounds. In Kampala for example, it is the Lord Mayor who has consistently questioned the cost of city roads, but because he is not technically knowledgeable on  matters of road engineering, his screeches are just that. We have seen contractors demanding for a revision of bills of quantities during execution of a project, this could be one of the ways of executing budgeted corruption. Some budgets can have the same project appearing every financial year without a progress report, these are tricks of cyclic budgeted corruption.

At district level, budgeted corruption is at epidemic levels. It seems when decentralization policy was enacted, corruption was decentralized fast. The challenge with local councils, is that most councilors are elected on the basis of individual popularity or party affiliation, but not competence. At the end of the day, the council will be full of popular councilors, but functionally illiterate.

The disaster is that, it is these councilors that are supposed to scrutinize budgets formulated by the district technical team that knows how to conflate several figures that the council must pass. The passing of the budget will be a formality since the councilors cannot interpret the budget. In most councils, the secretary for finance may not even have the slightest inkling of accounting, but because he studied to a slightly higher level than the rest, he is picked as a requirement of the law. How can such oversight a CAO with a master’s degree?

The school boards and management committees are also major victims of budgeted corruption. Foundation schools like those started by religious institutions have a tendency of specifying the persons who must be on the boards by virtue of the position they hold in church or mosque. Not all people holding these positions are well versed with accounting principles. So the head teachers take advantage of this loophole to manipulate the budget, well aware that the supervisors are not informed. Sometimes these boards are filled with members who are rich as a way of attracting funds, but these rich people do not devote enough time to the budgeting process and the head teachers know it. Others think their contribution is charity and how it is used is not their concern, since God appreciates the act of giving.

Some of the biggest culprits of budgeted corruption are community groups like Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (SACCOs). SACCOs by nature are member based entities, that don’t discriminate among members of any community irrespective of their education background. The leaders exploit this illiteracy to inflate operational budgets or out rightly fleece members’ contributions due to ignorance. Their privileged position is abused to the detriment of the uneducated. It is syndicated evil act.