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| Parliament slashes budgetary allocation to Office of Government Machinery by ¢17m || FORMATGH |
The initial 2023 budget allotted by Parliament to the Office of Government Machinery has been reduced by 17 million.
Following the House's Thursday decision that some of the budgetary items were extraneous and unneeded, this occurred.
After the Finance Committee rejected 15.5 million for the Special Development Initiatives secretariat and 2 million for the Monitoring and Evaluation secretariat, the roughly 1.5 billion allocation was decreased.
The monitoring and evaluation secretariat was not required to be maintained because its duties were already carried out by the Municipal and District Assemblies, according to Kwaku Kwarteng, chairman of the finance committee, who also explained that the committee carefully considered the estimates allotted to the Office of Government Machinery.
On Thursday, he stated on the floor, "Also, the monitoring and evaluation duties are undertaken across MDAs and MMDAs and there is no compelling need to retain the secretariat for same." This is particularly true in an age where spending rationalization is of the highest significance.
Mr. Kwarteng stated that "the national development authorities established by law are capable of managing their affairs without the need for a bureaucratic secretariat to coordinate and sometimes duplicate the functions while ambulance operations ought to be properly handled by the National Ambulance Service and not the Special Development initiative secretariat" in order to justify the rejection of the estimates from the Special Development Initiatives secretariat.
Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson, the committee's ranking member, indicated that the budget cut was made to let the administration know that if it made a pointless allocation, the House would reject it.
"The parliament's finance committee was able to save this nation about 18 million cedis. Even though we have development authorities that have been constituted by law and have their own governing boards, we observe this as part of the discussions.
"The government has allocated 15.6 million cedis to the office of government machinery's special development initiative secretariat, which will supervise the activities of these development agencies. We believe that this is unnecessary," he said.
