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Cameroon government behind scheduled time of 2020 Budget

State financial administrations are struggling to produce the statistical publications scheduled in the budget calendar on time. This is a departure from Cameroon’s commitments in terms of transparency and good governance.

28 out of 100. This is the note that Cameroon obtained on April 30, 2020 in the 2019 World Report on the Survey of Open Budgets (EBO). In the previous ranking, in 2017, the country had obtained 7/100. What therefore raise “an important and significant advance”, as Charlie Martial Ngounou, Executive President of the NGO Afroleadership, which works for transparency and citizen participation in the management of public finances, points out. The country is, however, well below the world average (45/100) and does worse than Benin (49/100), Senegal (46/100) or Côte d’Ivoire (34/100).

According to EBO analysts, Cameroon’s rating is dependent on part of the non-publication in 2019 of the “Mid-Year Review”; this is a “full update on budget execution from the middle of the fiscal year [which] includes a review of economic assumptions and an updated forecast of budget results”. On the other hand, the government has “produced for internal use only”, the 2019 citizen budget and the audit report. The citizen budget is a simpler and less technical version of the draft budget or approved budget of the Executive, designed to convey essential information to the public. Published by the Supreme Audit Institution, the audit report examines the soundness and completeness of the government’s year-end accounts.

For the current year, the calendar for the publication of the 2020 public finance statistics has been available since January 31, 2020. At the Directorate-General for the Budget, we recall that the objective of this calendar is to “guarantee wide access of the public to budgetary, accounting and financial information from the State. In fact, the documents and the deadlines which are registered there are listed on the basis of exchanges with the administrations involved (Ministry of the Economy, Ministry of Public Markets, General Directorate of Taxes, General Directorate of Customs, General Directorate of Treasury …) consistent with international standards for the publication of public finance statistics.

Charlie Martial Ngounou

Transparency and good governance

The specificity of this year’s calendar is that it integrates all the publication requirements induced by the presidential decree of May 31, 2019 setting the state’s budget calendar. Which suggested a scrupulous respect by the administrations concerned. However, it has to be said that a number of the publications listed there have not yet been produced; the deadlines being exceeded.

Rendered in the fifth month of the fiscal year, the teams of the Ministry of Finance are working on the drafting of the Note on the first version of the macroeconomic framework for the 2021 financial year. However, none of the statistical publications for April n ‘is still available on the websites of this ministerial department, the general directorate of the budget, or that of the general directorate of the Treasury and Financial and Monetary Cooperation. Until the time we went to press, there was still no record of the annual report on the implementation of the 2019 budget, summary situation of the operations of the Treasury in the first quarter of 2020, initial medium-term expenditure framework 2021-2023 .

Even some publications that should have been available since January are still awaited. These are, for example, the 2018 Tax Expenditure Report, the report on the assessment of the budgetary risks incurred by the central administration, the 2020 cash plan, the 2020 public procurement plan, the report on the financial activity of local and regional authorities, of the budget execution report for the fourth quarter of 2019.

However, Cameroon has adopted a law bearing the “Code of Transparency and Good Governance in the Management of Public Finances” but habits are obviously tough. Indeed, transparency alone is not enough to improve governance. Public participation is essential to achieve the positive results associated with greater budget transparency.

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