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The role of parliament in the implementation of the PRSP
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5. Pre-Budget Report, 2002-2003 Financial Year: Monitoring the PRSP?
In all these exercises there is need for choices. Because of the numerous constraints the committee decided that not all the priority expenditures could be monitored with the same intensity. What was important was to tap on parliament's comparative advantage. Surely parliament's comparative advantage is in the fact that it approves the budget. Parliament accesses the budget documents. Budget documents for the 2001/2002 financial year add to some 4,401 pages, with expenditure on Agriculture and Irrigation alone covering some 1,020 pages. The economic Report and the Financial Statement add up to an additional 290 pages. These are a maze. There is need to track expenditure lines down to district levels to ensure that objectives spelt out in the Estimates of Expenditure (output based) were being made. This, the committee decided was its comparative advantage even if it meant that it had to be complemented by a consultant.
Secondly, it was known that in education for example a powerful lobby, the Teachers Union of Malawi (TUM), would be fighting for reasonable teacher's salaries and packages. The committee therefore decided that it would leave out that priority line of expenditure and settle for teaching and learning materials and teacher training.
Thirdly, the committee was aware that civil society networks were also positioned to monitor outputs of the budget but at the grassroots level. The committee therefore decided that it would benefit from the inputs from civil society, which was working from the bottom-up, while the committee was moving from treasury to Ministries, through Departments to the district levels of expenditure.
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