By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
It’s 8:30am on a Friday morning and people were streaming to Tower Hill.
By the time some of us could get there, there was already a dancing party waiting to welcome us, at the House of Parliament.
Supporters of the ruling Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) and loyalists of the Finance Minister, Jacob Jusu Saffa (JJ Saffa) were dressed in green T-shirts with inscriptions like: ‘We support JJ Saffa’ and ‘We stand with JJ Saffa – FY 2020 Budget’.
Saffa was on his way to Parliament to read the budget for the 2020 Financial Year. For a purpose as serious as this, you would wonder if all the costume and dancing was necessary.
If you didn’t know better, you would think Saffa was in Parliament on Friday to defend his job. And perhaps he was.
For Members of Parliament (MPs), this was one of those days when they will do it for the camera and the audience. At least 10 to 15 of the SLPP MPs were dressed in all green attires. A certain MP even wore dark shades throughout the speech in the well, to add to his costume.
From time to time, MPs from all sides of the House would throw jibes at each other. The House was extra loud. SLPP MPs would loudly cheer Saffa on and together with the crowd in the galleries, made up of mostly SLPP supporters, they would burst into a loud chorus of ‘Maaaaaada Bioooo, Maaaaaada Bio aaaaaaay’.
Opposition MP’s weren’t quiet either. They pitched in with undertones.
This was the day for security officers in parliament to also show how much work they are doing. They were so overzealous that they were physically sending some people out for one reason or another. At one point the Speaker of the House had to shout for order to be restored in the Well.
This was Parliament last Friday.
But beneath all that pump and hype, there was a certain serenity. Serenity and ponderance to the enormity of what was happening there. This is because down in the well was government, telling us all how much it planned to spend on our education, health and prosperity, next year.
The man in the middle who was reading these commitments for the second-year running was JJ Saffa, as he is commonly known. He is perhaps lucky to stand in that well again. Some 24 hours earlier, he just survived a cabinet reshuffle. With public opinion against him, he is perhaps the luckiest of them all.
The bread and butter
More jobs are set to be created in tourism, agriculture and construction.
But more jobs suggest a considerable rise in the government’s wage bill. Government figures suggest that by 2020 it will be spending Le3.17 trillion in wages, an increase of Le 586.6 billion of the current wage bill.
Opposition MP, Dr Kandeh Yumkella expressed concerns about how much strain this would put on the country’s resources.
“My general impression is that the size of government keeps increasing. Expenditure is under control. The wage bill from their projection will go from Le2.9 trillion to Le3.46 trillion by 2022. So, for me that is a growing government; it is not a reduction in government. So, one still begins to wonder whether in fact there will be enough left to invest in bread and butter,” he told Politico.
But it looks as if government is counting on the revenues it will generate next year, to cover the shortfall. One of its intended revenue sources is covering leakages. Government officials say they intend to do this by streamlining tax waiver systems and introduce what it calls a Duty Tax Waiver policy.
“For the first three quarters of 2019 alone revenue lost to import GST and customs duty waivers amounted to more than Le 500 billion,” Saffa said.
Whiles this will create more revenue for government, it will certainly put strain on international organizations and donor funded projects; both categories accounted for 40.3% and 23.5% respectively of the tax exemption losses government incurred.
And teachers are the winners
Unsurprisingly, this budget apportioned 22% to be invested in education. The highest allocation yet again. And perhaps the greatest beneficiaries are the teachers. The budget has catered for a 30% increment on their salary. This will come into effect in April 2020.
Teachers have had a raw deal since the introduction of the Free Quality Education, the government’s flagship program.
Sitting on the right hand side of Saffa during his budget presentation was the Chief Minister, Pro. David Francis. One row back was Alpha Timbo, who is outgoing Minister of Basic and Secondary Education.
As a minister and a former teacher, Timbo had been instrumental in these negotiations with the teachers. But he will now serve in his new role as the Minister of Labor and Social Security.
Perhaps Timbo’s first job will be to roll out government’s new policy on the minimum wage. In Friday’s budget, Saffa said minimum wage has now been raised from Le 500, 000 to Le 600, 000.
What was missing in this budget though is the students loan scheme that government first spoke of in last year’s budget. This year, all three colleges in the University of Sierra Leone have raised fees by at least 25% on average. This has put enormous pressure on students from poor family background.
But the crowd in the gallery and cheering MPs might not have noticed that. At least not in the first glance. But they might, after discussions on the budget in the coming days.
Whiles everyone was cheering, Saffa had to take several water breaks. His throat was getting dry from all the reading. It should be, he was reading a 43 page document in front of a grand audience. By the end of his two-hour speech, he probably took six water breaks.
Agriculture and Health
Education aside, our spending in Agriculture and Health continues to be below international expectation. Like Education, the Ministry of Agriculture were keen on getting just 10% of the budget. But they only got 6%, even though this is a 50% increase from what they had last year, it is not enough.
Allocation for Health just went up by 1%; that is from 10 to 11%. Even with 15% allocation that the ministry has been clamoring for, Sierra Leone’s health sector will still be stretched thin.
The recent Millennium Challenge Cooperation scorecard showed how much the country must do. Sierra Leone passed with 68% on Health Expenditure; one of the three health indicators. However, this didn’t reflect on other indicators like Immunization Rate where the country scored 48% and Child Health where the country failed with a score of 21%. All this shows that we clearly have our work cut out for us.
There is work to be done everywhere, even with sectors that got what they wanted. Every year government’s budget becomes bolder, and with this boldness comes a lot of expectations.
Managing these expectations with the resources we have as a country will be Saffa’s job once again. As he finished reading the budget on Friday, he thanked a long list of people. After which, he stood there briefly and inhaled the whole atmosphere all over again.
As he was thanking all those on his list, Saffa sounded like a man who was bidding farewell, well in advance. He doesn’t know what will come next, but he was grateful for making it through this year and giving this speech.
His future is tied to President Bio’s discretion and the economy.
Until then, can Saffa deliver this “Bread and Butter”?
© 2019 Politico Online
