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Conferences should feed into budget
By Tichaendepi Chuma
THE recently concluded Zanu-PF Eighth National People’s Conference held at Esigodini in Mzingwane District revealed the need to reconsider the timing of the ruling party’s annual event.
Some of the major resolutions made at the conference showed that there is need to re-juxtapose conferences to the National Budget; that is, the question of which should precede the other, the conference or the National Budget?
When the Zanu-PF conference broke into committees on December 10, 2005, this author -- who happened to be at event -- observed that a lot of recommendations with budgetary implications were made by the delegates.
For example, during discussions of the sub-committee on the State of the Economy, brilliant ideas which the National Budget had to address were raised by the delegates.
But the question was: "How was the National Budget going to address the recommendations when it had already been presented to the nation on December 1, 2005 by the Minister of Finance, Dr Herbert Murerwa?" Was it ever possible to accommodate the ideas of the conference in the 2006 National Budget?
It became apparent that the ideas aired at the conference could not be accommodated in the 2006 budget, perhaps in the one for 2007. But what is the purpose of talking about the 2007 budget when the one for next year had not run its span? This anomaly needs to be addressed.
Some of the recommendations with budgetary implications made at the conference include the need to review salaries of civil servants, especially teachers, introduction of skills retention allowances, enhanced health service delivery, increasing expenditure on irrigation schemes, building dams, allocating more funds to small- and medium-scale enterprises, agricultural input support schemes, building new agricultural, fertiliser and chemical manufacturing plants, support for small-scale miners, and technological development through computer education in schools.
If these ideas were to be taken into account, it means the Government has to revisit its allocations and prioritisation in the National Budget. But as things were to show, any discussions on fiscal matters had already been overtaken by events as the 2006 budget was already before Parliament by the time of the conference.
In view of this, Zanu-PF national conferences and congresses be held prior to the presentation of national annual budgets so that they become part of the broader consultative budget formulation process. Zanu-PF, as the ruling party, gives direction to the activities of central government and should, therefore, play a critical role in the budget formulation process. This is as it should be given that Zanu-PF national conferences and congresses are mostly preoccupied with issues about how the party intends to manage the national cake.
The fact that Zanu-PF conferences are capable of drawing a wide cross-section of the Zimbabwean community is enough testimony that the conferences should come before the budget. The current budget consultative process does not go down enough to capture the views of the majority of the people in the rural areas. As evident, the pre-budget consultative process in the country has been confined to provincial capitals depriving the poor people in the outlying areas of their right to state their opinions on issues that the national budget should address. Zanu-PF conferences would, therefore, give a fair representation of opinions given the diverse backgrounds of the participants.
As things stand, Zanu-PF is excluding its own members from contributing to the formulation of the budget by holding its conferences after it has been presented to Parliament.
The Esigodini conference also showed the need to make an audit of whether previous resolutions have been implemented. What appears to be the norm in Zanu-PF is the formulation of resolutions year in year out without reporting to plenary conferences how previous resolutions had been dealt with in determining the resolutions that should be carried over into subsequent years. Surely, delegates will be keen to have results-oriented reports on the performance of the party regarding its previous targets (resolutions). Prior to this year’s conference, other Zanu-PF provinces had resolved not to send in new resolutions, saying they wanted to know what happened to the previous ones.
This shows the need for a feedback system where delegates send in resolutions and get feedback from the party hierarchy about the implementation side.
The need to carry out an audit of previous party resolutions should be carried out by vibrant working committees. Zanu-PF seems to have realised the need for committees between conferences to ensure that resolutions are implemented and feedback provided during the next conference.
At the Esigodini conference, the ruling party resolved to set up committees to shadow the activities of central government in order to monitor the implementation of party resolutions.
The issue of working committees brings the question of whether there is enough time for them to report progress on a yearly basis given the volume of resolutions that is being churned out at party conferences every year. It appears the rate at which resolutions are being made is not commensurate with mechanisms to implement them.
This is important because of late, Zanu-PF resolutions at conferences are getting more and more predictable because of their repetitiveness.
A person who has been following events within Zanu-PF can actually come up with a list of resolutions prior to a conference. This is a sign that there has not been much on the implementation side.
One way of dealing with the problem of recurring resolutions is for Zanu-PF to reconsider the interval between its conferences from a year to two years to give working committees two years in between to make sure that resolutions are implemented as agreed.
To expect progress in one year and make new resolutions is too short a period in public policy.
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