Comprehensive Performance Reporting: A Must For Good Governance

Madam President, may your attention be drawn to the fact that there continues to be no comprehensive performance reporting of government's activities since 2006. Comprehensive performance reporting is indispensable for good governance because it helps governance to know what is going on, what mistakes are being made and how to correct the mistakes to move forward for the better. Reports from the Ministry of Finance are limited to only central government expenditures, and are therefore not comprehensive.

At the outset in 2006, the 2005/06 budget was adjusted. I suggested publicly at the time that a comprehensive performance report was absolutely necessary for the successful implementation of the adjusted 2005/06 budget. No such report was made. If such a report had been made, it would help to prevent many mistakes, including the July 26, 2006 fire at the Executive Mansion . Prior to that fire, the repairs estimate for the Executive Mansion was approximately USD7.5 million. After the fire the repairs estimate has at least doubled.

Prior to the start of this state governance dispensation, the assessment on Liberia 's strides in the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) showed that the monitoring and evaluation function was generally weak throughout the government. As significant improvement in the monitoring and evaluation function is indispensable for good governance, the paucity in comprehensive performance reporting decrease the likelihood of the attainment of the MDGs on schedule. Already, the assessment on the MDGs had concluded that Liberia would not be able to achieve the MDGs within the agreed time frame (by 2015).

The monitoring and evaluation inertia transited to the 2006/07 budget. No comprehensive performance report played a role in the formulation of the 2006/07 budget. When the directorate of national budgeting was advised of the fundamental budgeting problem, the response was that the World Bank President, at the time, found the budget to be alright and therefore there was no fundamental problem with the budgeting. Subsequently, as you know, that World Bank President was forced to resign because of inefficiency and corruption. The budget directorate's response is within the counter-productive convention of externally driven national economic management.

It is essentially this externally driven national economic management that has resulted in the approval of the Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy (IPRS) in Washington , D.C. , USA prior to the start of significant popular local participation on the formulation of the IPRS. The approval of the IPRS at the Washington, D.C. Partnership Forum did not benefit form any significant monitoring and evaluation of the mass poverty syndrome in Liberia . If such benefit were the case, another judgment would have prevailed to allow the approval to be informed by widespread popular participation in Liberia the absence of such participation could very well be problematic for Liberia within the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, as popular participation in national decision-snaking is a requirement under the Initiative.

The budget has turned out to be problematic at many levels. First, there is no indication of the gap between the rich and the poor. This is rather strange, considering that the 1906 budget, over a century ago, provided information on the monthly salary of the President and other government officials as well as on the salaries of civil servants. Observation of the dynamics of the salary and access to public resources gap enables one to know whether or not poverty is increasing or reducing. Clearly, such determination on the state of poverty would be made with information on the cost of living because it is the purchasing power of people that matters most in the determination of their welfare. Another level in the budget is seen in the raising of expectation about poverty reduction only to find in all of the approved budgets since the 2006/07 budget no indication budgetary amounts and how they relate to poverty reduction. Making comprehensive performance reporting a requirement for the budgetary process would be very useful in operationalizing poverty reduction through the budget.

The government remains ineffective as it continues to govern with many crucial inputs for decision-making existing outside of the budgetary process. The budgets of public corporations are outside of the national budget. Public funds emanating from other governments and inter-governmental entities remain outside of the budgeting process. We can readily recall that the United States Ambassador in summarizing the considerable assistance given Liberia recently by the United States government, referred to nearly USD2million for DDRR, UNMIL, relief and reconstruction. It is not possible to have efficient national economic management when significant funds for government programs and projects do not go through the budgeting process.

The non-inclusion of these significant expenditures on government programs and projects in the budgetary process is an abdication of the governance function to external entities. Such abdication leads to external control of decision-making and renders it impossible to be effective in governance. As these expenditures are outside the budgetary process, the question of comprehensive performance reporting on them can not be brought up. In the face of such abdication of rights to governance, one can not lay claim to the building of democratic institutions. In fact, true partners would be engaged in activities directed at preventing such abdication. However, the Liberian experience in partnership points to the reverse: abdication is being encouraged to the extent of giving visible prominence to projects as being implemented by partners rather than government. Needless to say that such posture remains counter-productive with respect to capacity-building.

We come to the closure of this commentary by re-emphasizing the indispensability of comprehensive performance reporting for good governance. Hopefully, the National Legislature will recognize this indispensability in its examination and approval of the 2008/09 National Budget.