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

Budgeting in Postconflict Countries 457
includes Belgium, France, the African Development Bank, and the World
Bank, with the full association of the International Monetary Fund. The government
welcomes new partners in this framework, which promises to provide
a measure of coherence and to prevent duplication in external
assistance to rebuild Burundi’s public expenditure management apparatus.
Will It Last?
Burundi has made remarkable progress in national and interethnic reconciliation
and in political governance. There are grounds to hope that the
same will be true of a gradual return to the reasonably good public management
standards of the late 1980s. Fiscal management improvements are
an investment for the future and will take time to be implemented. But the
needed budgeting systems, procedures, and personnel must be in place by
the time political and financial circumstances are right for a more strategic
allocation of resources and for increased efficiency and effectiveness in public
service provision. Thus, the process of institutional reconstruction needs
to accelerate now lest the degraded state of financial management become
the operative constraint to growth in two or three years.
Fortunately, Burundi still has assets on which to build. At its center, the
public financial management apparatus retains a degree of discipline and
service ethos. Staff members are at their posts, documents can be found,
fairly reliable statistics exist, requests for information are met, and the new
government leadership is committed to a process of institutional improvement
with neither illusion nor defeatism. Perhaps most important, although
intangible and impossible to demonstrate, is a new sense of the possible
among the key actors. Thus, by contrast to many other postconflict countries
in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, the public
financial management situation in postconflict Burundi engenders serious
concerns but not cynicism.
A Concluding Word
The objective of expenditure screening mechanisms is not only to reject bad
expenditure proposals but also to foster the beginning of lasting expenditure
management improvements. Hence, as the budget proposals are assessed,
constructive feedback should be provided to the ministry and agency
concerned, and the experience gained through the assessment of the first
round of proposals should be incorporated into the parallel capacitybuilding
activities.