THE East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) has approved the East African Community (EAC)’s supplementary budget of 4,977,475 US Dollars(about 11.5bn/-) for the Financial Year ending 30th June 2020, to meet additional expenditure.
The regional House has approved the amount for the financial year ending 30th June this year to fund its additional expenditure for priority projects and programmes that were thus far unfunded.
Chairman of the EAC Council of Ministers, Ambassador Olivier Nduhungirehe tabled the EAC Supplementary Appropriation Bill, 2020 that was enacted, sailing through the House after debate and without any amendment.
The amount is to support a number of activities that include a study for Sustainable Funding Mechanis 120,000 US Dollars), facilitation of delegates from South Sudan and Burundi, not funded by development partners (17,000$) and repair-works at EAC Headquarters (305,000$).
The budget also seeks to finance the drafting of an EAC Political Confederation Constitution (150,000$) and improving collaborative conservation and management of Trans Boundary Natural Resources in the EAC amounting to 344,770 US Dollars.
Furthermore, the new budget will facilitate other activities including the development of a Regional Policy on Wildlife Conservation and Management, (155,420$), a detailed Architectural and Engineering Design of the Mugina/Manyovu One-Stop-Border- Post, (480,000 US Dollars) and for the validation of the draft 6th EAC Development Strategy (2021/2022 to 2025/2026)– amounting to 41,400 US Dollars.
A bulk of the amount 1, 86 3,955 US Dollars is to be used for the Financial Sector Development and Regionalisation Project.
The East African Science and Technology Commission (EASTECO) was requesting for 6 9,56 6 $ to finance two key projects; development of the EAC-Regional Policy for Science, Technology and Innovation (27,808$) and the development of the Online Observatory Platform on Bio economy Resource Sharing that is 41,758 US Dollars.
Meanwhile, the Lake Victoria Basin Commission (LVBC) was requesting for additional appropriation of 1,125,984$ .
To aid the construction of its headquarters is 942,144 US DOLLARS and for the project on the Planning for Resilience in East Africa through Policy, Adaption, Research and Economic Development (PREPARED) is pegged at 183,840 US Dollars.
At the EAC Competitions Authority, an extra amount of 59,470 US Dollars is to be expended towards instituting amendments to the EAC Competition Regulations 2010 and EAC Competition Act 2006.
The supplementary budget also will be catering for the Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA) that sought 178,710 US Dollars for the 2nd phase of the headquarters construction.
In his submissions, the Chairman of the General- Purpose Committee, Mr Abdikadir Aden, said the projects and activities to be supplemented during the financial year include an additional expenditure for the EAC Secretariat pegged at 3,477,545 US Dollars.
Mr Aden stated that the supplementary budget was subjected to the anticipation that partner states would honour their financial obligations.
He therefore urged the Secretariat and the Council of Ministers to further engage with the partner states to honour their statutory obligations to the EAC Budget for financial year 2019/2020.
While other members of the House supported the bill, Ms Susan Nakawuki opposed it stating that the majority of the issues stated for additional expenditure were not warranted, saying she was thinking they were handling a postmortem, where the money was already expended.
She said there were a number of studies undertaken on Sustainable Funding Mechanism and there was no need to disburse additional resources on the matter.
The Chair of Council of Ministers in response said reforms of the structures as concerns staffing and the completion of the Sustainable funding Mechanism would be speeded up.
He said the Council was concerned by the low remittances which stand at 6 1 per cent of the total amount with few months remaining to the end of the financial year.
The minister commended Uganda for availing additional resources to support the drafting of the Political Confederation Constitution.
