Abuja— Failure to link policies, plans, Medium Term Sector Strategy, MTSS, and budgets has been identified as a major factor that leads to deficient planning and poor budgeting outcomes in many developing countries.
Budget and National Planning Minister, Senator Udoma Udo Udoma, who disclosed this, yesterday, in Abuja, said countries with fragmented planning process, which failed to align with the annual budgeting process, usually experienced difficulty in implementing clear and consistent national policies.
Acknowledging that this had been the case with Nigeria over the years, the minister, who spoke at a sensitization workshop on MTSS (2017-2019), organized by his Ministry for Federal Permanent Secretaries and Head of Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, said it was necessary to bring them up to speed with the process of developing the MTSS as well as its relevance to the budget preparation process.
Referring to the theme of the workshop
“Addressing the approach to developing the medium-term sector strategies and plans,” the minister said it was coming at a time the country was experiencing dwindling revenues, occasioned by the declining price of crude oil in the international market and other disruptive developments in the polity.
He, however, emphasized Buhari administration’s commitment to strengthen the linkage between plans and budgets to ensure better implementation of projects and programmes.
“We are also committed to fostering inclusive development which explains the unprecedented allocation of N500 billion to social investment projects in the 2016 Budget of Change,” he added.
The current MTSS exercise, he pointed out, would be limited to selected critical sectors to support the preparation of the 2017 Budget. He said: “It is planned to roll out the MTSS process to all sectors/MDAs from 2017 and beyond.
This is aimed at guiding MDAs for more efficient and effective investment of national resources in critical sectors of the economy, in line with the Change Agenda.” Just as the MTSS (2017-2019) of the selected MDAs will serve as basis for their 2017 budget proposals, it will also serve as credible input into the development of the 2017-2020 MTDP currently being developed under the coordination of the Budget and National Planning Ministry.
This is aimed at improving the linkage between the spending of the Federal Government MDAs and the goals of MTDP (2017 -2020) and the SDGs. The minister said Nigeria had not been doing well in ensuring that budget outcomes achieved planned targets as most of the MDAs had also not been developing their MTSS and adopting it as a basis for budget formulation for several years.
This development, according to him, informed government’s decision to reintroduce the MTSS, the first of which will cover Fiscal Year 2017-2019. This, he added, was expected to compliment other strategies of government in fast-tracking the development process in the country.
Explaining that the MTSS links sector/MDA strategic objectives to over-arching national development goals, being a key component of the Medium Term Expenditure Framework, MTEF, process, Senator Udoma said it would compliment the implementation of the zero-base budgeting, ZBB, system by ensuring that projects and programmes in the annual budgets aligned with mandates of MDAs and linked to government policy thrusts and strategic objective of improving service delivery to the people.
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