By Hassan I. Conteh

Sierra Leone’s leading financial civil society organization, Budget Advocacy Network (BAN), says in a latest report that government of Sierra Leone spends more money that it collects annually as revenues over the past three years.

“If you spend more than what you collect as income; it means you need to have other sources of income to fill that difference or gap,” says Abu Bakarr Tarawally, BAN’s National Coordinator.

He was speaking at BAN’s launching of two major reports to the public at the new City Council Lobby Hall on Thursday 9, November, 2023 in Freetown.

The two reports presented by BAN are: Budget Credibility Report and An Analysis of High-level Revenue and Expenditure of January to September, 2022 and 2023.

The Irish Civil Society Partnership (ICSP) was working with some CSOs including BAN in undertaking key projects on budget accountability and budget reporting, expenditure and revenue mobilization.

ICSP seeks to promote accountability of civil society projects in which Christain Aid Sierra Leone plays a leading role in the implementation of ICSP’s five years project.

“We as CSOs help to hold government accountable and when budgets targets are not met or public finances are not managed well it has the tendency to perpetrate inequality and that services sectors are affected as a result…President Bio had said he was committed to raising domestic revenues of 20% GDP by 2027…and we now talk of Feed Salone project, and these projects should be financed by domestic revenues collected…so these two reports are important for stakeholders consideration that is for government, CSOs and donour partners,” says, a representative of Action Aid Sierra Leone.

“This study is about transparency in all and it is about public trust in the way public funds are spent, allocated and managed,”

BAN indicated that it found a wide margin of government spending of various miniseries, departments and agencies during 2020, 2021 and 2022 yearly budgets.

For 2020, BAN said, government approved budget by parliament was Le 360.6 billion old Leones but it spent Le 392.9 billion old leones.

BAN’s National Cordinator, Mr. Tarawally, said government of Sierra Leone was allocating some huge sums of money as budget to fund some ministries and a certain sector while other ministries are deprived of similar funds.

They named ministries with the largest shares of budgets for the years 2020, 2021 and 2022 and they are: Defence ministry, ministry of agriculture and forestry, ministry of energy, education and police.

The Budget Credibility Report captures that healthcare sector alone had a budget of Le 13.1 billion old leone but that 1.1 billion was only accounted for to have been utilized.

The CSO says government of Sierra Leone was failing in about three of the financial management and budget reporting benchmarks of BAN’s study.

Budget advocacy Network has been playing a key role in closely monitoring government Accountant General’s office at finance ministry.

In the two latest reports, the civil society said, it used the PFMF (Public Financial Management Framework). BAN also found out in their report that government has largely not been following certain provisions enshrined in the country’s Public Financial Management (PFM) Act of 2016.

It warns for a cut down on public officials “overseas” travelling in a bid to reduce costs.

BAN’s recommends for a Centralized Travel Management, and  for a Digitalized Tax System in the country and for an improvement of a Property Tax Collection Systems.

“With E-Government platform; there will be more savings, movements by staff on vehicles will be reduced and hence fuel costs will be cut down; E-government platform also calls for less paper buying,” adding that these are all administrative burden pointing to huge operating costs.

“Government of Sierra Leone was unable to score an A or B but it only scored D on the aspect of expenditure outtrun based on our PFMF’s study. Government fails mainly because of lack of donor data reporting; however, the overall revenue forecasts has been good,” Mr. Tarawally says.