Public Sector Governance and Accountability Series: Budgeting and ...

Strengthening Public Expenditure Management in Africa 395
efforts—awareness raising, prevention, and enforcement. Like the three legs
of a stool, each of the three efforts is necessary; none is sufficient alone in the
long run. Prevention and enforcement cannot succeed if corruption is viewed
as normal or inevitable, awareness and strict enforcement cannot be effective
if the opportunities for corruption are too many and too easy, and limiting
opportunities for corruption combined with greater awareness may be equally
ineffective if enforcement is lax or nonexistent. 9
In African countries, where reliable data are notable for their absence,
the awareness-prevention-enforcement model needs to be adapted and
expanded into five major avenues of reform and intervention:
1. Find the detailed facts about the loci and circuits of financial corruption,
through surveys, targeted expenditure tracking, and other means.
2. Disseminate the facts, and enlist civil society to shed light on bribery
problems and blow the whistle.
3. Prevent corruption through appropriate streamlining of the regulatory
framework.
4. Strengthen enforcement.
5. Build the capacity of public financial accountability institutions.
Balance the Objectives
In the majority of African countries where expenditure control and cash
management are already minimally acceptable, none of the three PEM
objectives of expenditure control, resource allocation, and good operational
management should be pursued in isolation from the others (just as
the overall policy goals of growth, stability, and equity are interrelated).
Improvements in one or another area can and should go forward as and
when circumstances permit. But a coherent vision of the entire reform process
is needed to prevent progress in any one objective from getting so far out of
line as to compromise progress in the other two—and thus the PEM reform
process in its entirety. Moreover, equity is an additional critical objective of
PEM in poor developing countries, including most of Africa. Three important
general criteria emerge from these considerations:
A multiyear fiscal and expenditure perspective is essential to formulate a
coherent vision of reform.
A pro-poor expenditure composition should be deliberately encouraged.
Moreover, a reorientation of the government budget toward the
needs of the poor and most vulnerable is an explicit requirement of