Author: Moses Khisa. PHOTO/FILE
Early on as a doctoral student, I got interested in understanding the governing systems and mechanisms of a group of regimes in contemporary Africa that came to power through violence and ‘revolution’.
I wanted to investigate how the route to power and the initial power-consolidating strategies shaped the governmental systems that emerged, with far-reaching implications for state/nation-building, government efficiency, accountability, and social stability.
The regimes I wanted to study had come to power through two tracks, one by way of military coups d’état (in Ghana and Burkina Faso, both in early 1980s), and another via protracted guerrilla insurgency – in Ethiopia/Eritrea, Rwanda, and Uganda in mid-1980s and early 1990s.In social science research, we grapple with the challenge of how best to analyse, empirically, what we are interested in studying.
A key starting point is to determine the core concepts that capture the reality one wants to study. We use concepts as tools of analysis. They help simplify otherwise complex reality, but whether or not they accurately capture empirical phenomena is always debatable. Reality is slippery. What passes as facts or data can be quite murky.
When I embarked on fieldwork in the four countries mentioned above (except Burkina Faso), my core research goal was to evaluate how political compromises and reform measures undertaken in the early years, after a rebel group or army officers captured power, impacted the quality of government and the nature of the state that took shape. I cannot possibly summarise here what became a 400-plus page PhD dissertation, but one of the things I did to understand the differences in quality of government and state strength, especially bureaucratic capacity, was a careful analysis of the national budget.
I looked at the national budgeting process as offering an excellent entry point to understanding the business of governing, so I systematically assembled a dataset of annual budget-estimates for the four countries for 10 years (2005-2015). Some of the figures I needed were available on websites of the respective ministries of finance, but they were incomplete, or some years completely unavailable, so I spent a lot of time in libraries in Addis Ababa, Accra, Kampala and Kigali poring over newspapers, government documents and NGO reports.
Studying the budgeting process and expenditure allocations gave me insights into the logics and politics undergirding the systems of government in those countries. While at it though, I zeroed in on something granular that provided a possible smoking gun for making a range of conclusions – supplementary budgets.
A standard practice in any country that purports to run on some form of democratic practice is for the executive branch, under the president or prime minister and through the ministry of finance, to present to parliament an outline of estimates for revenue and expenditure. Typically for a 12-month fiscal year.
Because of unforeseen events or due to miscalculation and misallocation, the government can go back to parliament and ask for additional funds, thus a supplementary budget. In Uganda, the 2015 Public Finance Management Act, the law governing collection and use of state revenue, grants the Ministry of finance authority to spend, without a parliamentary stamp, an additional three percent of the total budget approved by parliament.
By closely scrutinising annual supplementary budgets, I observed several facts that were quite instructive. First, the two countries that passed as relatively democratic, where elections and power contests were quite fierce (Ghana and Uganda), supplementary budgets were routine and big.
In both countries, as a percentage of the approved national budget, supplementary budgets tended to be very high. In Uganda, in one year, 2011, the supplementary budget for the financial year 2010/2011 was nearly 30 percent!
Second and you can guess from that last sentence, supplementary budgets were especially high during election years or the year preceding general elections. By contrast, in both Ethiopia and Rwanda, election or no election, for some years there were no supplementary budgets at all, for some years they were a very small percentage, always below five percent.
Third, particularly for the case of Uganda, the top allocations in supplementary budgets tended to go to ministries and departments dealing with national defence and security, and the state house, with the bulk of it often designated as classified. Uganda is less than a year away from the next general election in January 2025.
Last week, parliament rushed through a huge supplementary budget. Hundreds of billions of shillings allocated to private companies and projects. Dear reader, just one billion, only one, can tremendously turnaround the sorrowful state of my alma mater, Bubulo Secondary School, as we old students fight to keep it above the waters. But a coffee company, owned by a private citizen like you and me, got allocated Shs67 billion in a Shs4.2 trillion supplementary budget.
Here is the plot, whether allocated to government ministries and state house or to private companies, in an election season part of this money ultimately goes into a slush fund for ‘buying’ votes. I will return to this next week.
