Kano Govt Places PFM Reforms On Its Dev Agenda – Commissioner
By Abdullahi Yusuf
Kano state government has placed Public Financial Management (PFM) reforms at the core of its development agenda upon realizing that Budget is no more a mere statement of a projected revenues and expenditures but a moral contract between the government and the citizens.
The Commissioner of Planing and Budget, Alhaji Musa Sulaiman Shanono has said.
A statement by the Director Public Enlightenment Ministry of Finance and Economic Development,Mallam Aliyu Yusuf, said the Commissioner stated this while declaring open a 4-Day workshop on HOPE GOV Assessment and Health Budget Implementation Reporting, jointly organized by his ministry and the International Budget Partnership (IBP)with Gates Foundation’s funding to improve outcomes of HOPE-GOV programme in the state and Primary Health Care delivery at Assa Pyramid Hotel, Kaduna.
Over the past months, he said, the government had developed aggressive reforms with a view to ensuring Allocation Efficiency, Fiscal Discipline, and Citizens: Participation to enable the voices of the citizens to be heard in the budget process.
Shanono commended the role played by the HOPE-GOV Assessment which serves as a timely framework that assist in translating macro-level fiscal reforms into micro-level sector successes, stressing that the Governance Assessmentsvare not tools for criticism but mirrors for Self reflection.
” Therefore, the HOPE Assessment provides us with the empirical baseline needed to evaluate how effectively our governance structures support Health service delivery as well as allowing us to pinpoint bottlenecks in fund releases assess bureaucratic hurdles and optimize the value -for-money ratio in every naira spent in public health,” he said.
He lamented that if the government is allocating large percentage of its Budget to the health sector and without translating the allocations into functional PHC’s, available commodities,well trained staff and reduced maternal mortality, then the PFM reforms have remain incomplete.
On the workshop, the commissioner said that it will focus on Health Budget Implementation Reporting which is critical, adding that real-time, accurate and transparent reporting bridges the gap between intention and impact as well as ensuring proper tracking mechanisms to monitor funds from the central treasury to the Frontline health clinics across the local government areas in the state.
He then called on the participants, technical teams and the CSOs to participate actively, challenge the existing paradigms and co-create practical reporting frameworks that can be seamlessly integrated into Kano state’s planning and budgetary systems.