Parliament Cuts Budget Allocation To Office of Government Machinery By GH¢17m
Parliament has cut GH¢17 million from the budget allocated to the Office of Government Machinery for the 2023 fiscal year.
The House decided on Thursday, December 22, that some expenditure items in the budget were unnecessary.
The original GH¢1.5 billion budget was reduced after ¢15.5 million allocated for the Special Development Initiatives secretariat and ¢2 million for the Monitoring and Evaluation secretariat were rejected by the Finance Committee.
Kwaku Kwarteng, Chairman of the Finance Committee, explained that the committee saw no need to keep the Monitoring and Evaluation Secretariat when its functions were also performed by the Municipal and District Assemblies.
“Also, the monitoring and evaluation functions are performed across MDAs and MMDAs, and hence there is no compelling need to maintain the secretariat for same, especially in an era where expenditure rationalisation is of utmost importance,” he said.
Addressing the Special Development Initiatives secretariat, he pointed out that “the national development authorities established by law are capable of managing their affairs without the need for a bureaucratic secretariat to coordinate and at times duplicate the functions while ambulance operations ought to be properly handled by the National Ambulance Service and not the Special Development Initiative secretariat.”
Ranking Member of the Committee, Dr Cassiel Ato Forson, added that the reduction was to send a message to the government that should they present another “superfluous allocation”, the House would reject it.
“The finance committee of parliament managed to save this country an amount of almost 18 million cedis. We notice as part of the deliberations that even though we have development authorities that have been established by law with their own governing boards.
“The office of government machinery has a special development initiative secretariat that the government has apportioned 15.6 million cedis to – to oversee the work of this development authorities. We think this is needless,” he concluded.