Public finance management: Gov’t moves to consolidate, broaden citizens participation.

This was the central focus of the second Forum on Public Finance Management that grouped top officials of the Ministry of Finance, MINFI and heads of Civil Society Organizations, CSOs in the country. The meeting took place Friday November 10 in Yaounde.

The Director General of the Budget at MINFI, Cyril Edou, who stood in for Louis Paul Motaze, the Minister of Finance, told the assembly, before participants went into conclave, that Cameroonians in general, and representatives of civil society organisations in particular, needed to understand certain aspect of public finance management.

Edou said this will enable them to better collaborate with budget executors to make sure that public expenditures impact the population, improve the living condition of citizens and provide the needed impetus to accelerate overall national development.

To which end, Edou told participants that the new reforms carried out by the government as it concerns managing public finance; which are in conformity with the global reform plan covering the period 2022-2023 permitted hierarchy to redistribute duties and responsibilities, so that civil society can take a front role position in national public finance management.

The new definition also requires stakeholders to give added accent to issues of how to up transparency in expenditure, collection of public revenues, and for citizens to be able to check and control institutions that handle these duties.

Therefore, the forum would strive to open up and improve channels of information sharing, and how to improve collaboration between the stake holders, of which civil society is now expected to form a preponderant part.

Sophie Boumsong, Chief of Service for Budgetary Reforms at MINFI 

Government also has to assume fully the task of upgrading capacities of operators of civil society organizations so that they are empowered and are capable of carrying out their roles of checking and supervising state expenditure and receipts; so that Cameroonians benefit more as unnecessary expenditures are reduced to a minimum and pilfering of public resources brought to a minimum.

Overall, the objective is to see how civil society can be better implicated in government´s ongoing task of instituting good governance, and improving efficacy and efficiency in public finance management.

Therefore, experts drilled attendees on how to consolidate budgetary practices by increasing citizens participation in the making of annual state budgets; how to capitalize on citizen participation in the preparation and vulgarization of the state budget; and taking a look at the debt the government owes the public as at 2023.

The experts and participants also brainstormed on the role citizens can play in financing the decentralization process, as the government strives to seek more avenues through which regional and local councils could get more funds to carry out development projects that improve the living condition of Cameroonians.