Budget making ripe for turnaround

Chief justice David Maraga makes valid points when he warns about huge cuts in the budget of the Judiciary and how the situation is likely to cripple the delivery of justice.

The facts as stated by Justice Maraga are as follows: Initially, the Judiciary had proposed a budget of Sh31.2 billion. When the Treasury compiled the Budget Policy Statement, the budget was slashed by nearly 50 per cent to Sh 17.3 billion.

At the end of it all, Parliament cut the proposals further down to Sh14.5 billion.

According to Mr Maraga, the situation has been made worse by the National Treasury’s failure to grant extension to World Bank funded projects.

Justice Maraga is right. Indeed, the budget-making process has gone completely haywire.

The big question we must address is whether we have thought out our budgetary priorities well.

The rain started beating us with the Constitution and after we started toying with the idea of fiscal autonomy for arms of government.

It used to be said that in the old order, the Executive and Parliament controlled the purse and the sword.

Treasury mandarins liked seeing the Chief Justice going down on his knees before them begging for resources.

This situation was supposed to have changed after we adopted the concept of fiscal autonomy for constitutional offices.

It did not happen. In reality, what happened is that Parliament is the only institution that found itself enjoying expanded powers in the budget-making process.

Parliament does what it wants. That is how it has been increasing salaries, allowances, pensions of MPs with an unprecedented profligacy.

Parliament just imposes claims on the national purse without looking at the bigger picture.

READ: Sh14bn budget cut to derail case backlog clearance

It seems that we forgot that budget-making is about setting priorities for sectors and competing national priorities.

You choose between spending on hiring more judges and magistrates or building rural dispensaries.

If systems were working, Parliament should be playing the role of clearing house for these competing interests.

The system has completely failed. Which begs the question: Why has the system failed?

First, is the question of capacity. Parliament has proved ill-equipped for the job.

Today, budgetary appropriations by the House follows a practice where budget-making is reduced to a process of merely doling expenditures between the Executive, the Judiciary, the Parliamentary Service Commission and other constitutional offices without setting clear priorities.

Yet we know that when allocating, you must figure out impact on economic growth. Somebody must model the whole fiscal framework and measure whether expenditure allocations address national priorities.

You must figure out whether you are giving too much money to net and big consumers such as Parliament and the Judiciary compared to the producing sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing.

You have to consider whether wages, debt service and recurrent costs are taking a disproportionate share of the national purse, leaving meagre allocations to operations and maintenance of national assets.

When I look back, I feel that in the rush to reduce the imperial powers of the National Treasury, we whittled down the critical role this office should play in expenditure allocations.

We need to go back to the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) systems and making the fomular more robust. MTEF public hearings attracted a great deal of public participation.

As business and economic journalists, we enjoyed seeing permanent secretaries arguing and haggling for resources.

The predicament the Judiciary finds itself now is but the consequence of a State apparatus that has expanded massively within a very short period. The National Assembly is nearly twice its former size.

The Judiciary itself has expanded. We need to cut unproductive general administration expenditure.