Guvamatanga pledges transparency in Budget
Government is committed to transparency and accountability in the budgeting process and does not have anything to hide, Secretary for Finance and Economic Development Mr George Guvamatanga has said.
This comes as chairperson of the Public Accounts Committee, Mr Tendai Biti claimed on Monday, that Mr Guvamatanga snubbed a parliamentary hearing on the Financial Adjustment Bill that was introduced by Government last year and therefore Parliament should issue a warrant of arrest.
The committee wanted the disaggregation of the Bill, that was passed on Wednesday last week, seeking condonation on expenditure between 2015 and 2018.
However, in an interview Mr Guvamatanga said his office is currently operating with skeletal staff due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, and that with the National Budget presentation beckoning, it follows that priority should be given towards such an important programme.
“We are going to have the audit process, but at the moment our focus is on the impending National Budget and we are also seized with the National Development Strategy; we have to prioritise these areas.
“We also had a serious Covid-19 outbreak in the office and I had to lock it down for 45 days. It is very mischievous for someone to say such a thing. I was sick for three weeks, I find it extremely offending to say that we snubbed the hearing.
“The tabulation is there, sometimes we may have spent money and then go to Parliament, for instance during the Covid-19 lockdown there was no Parliament and we therefore could not go there yet we had to buy medicines and other supplies for the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Mr Guvamatanga.
He said information on Government expenditure is readily available and all the Bills have been presented as is expected under the country’s laws.
“We disaggregated the expenditure, all these financials were audited and there really should be no point in calling us to Parliament. We have skeletal staff and I don’t have people to deploy to Parliament. It was not a snub, when one is invited to Parliament, you can reply stating reasons why you can’t attend, and I gave the reasons. It is improper to say we snubbed Parliament”.
He said it was the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development that volunteered to provide information to Parliament in the interest of accountability and transparency.
“We realised that there was over-expenditure which needed regulation, it happened in 2015, 2016 and 2017. However, over-expenditure is not about overspending.
“In 2018, we ended up with more than we had budgeted, we could not keep that money in a hyper-inflationary environment,” he said.
Out of the 300 plus workers in the ministry only 45 have been reporting for duty in compliance with the World Health Organisation (WHO) regulations on de-congesting offices to enable social distancing.-herald.cl.zw
