Namibia’s regional and local authorities are under-resourced despite budget requests from the central government, the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) has revealed.
The findings are contained in the APRM country report on Namibia, which among many other focus areas explored how the government has moved in rolling out decentralisation services.
“The team heard that there are no established criteria on how the line ministries allocate budget to the regions. The review team was also informed that despite budget requests by regional councils to line ministries, no adequate resources are often allocated,” states the report conducted in 2021, although it was only launched today by President Nangolo Mbumba.
“The situation is further compounded by the fact that the central government and the regional and local authorities use different budget cycles, and there is a capacity shortage in some of the regional and local councils.”
It was further established that the fiscal decentralisation to local authorities has not yet been fully implemented and that local authorities only control less than 3% of public expenditures.
“Regions and municipalities are still financially and logistically dependent on the national government to carry out their respective mandates,” the report highlighted.
“From these interactions, the review team established that Namibia’s decentralisation is still at the delegation state. The team was informed of lack of budget control by the regional councils, and that the system of sectoral budgeting at the centre does not allow councils to reallocate funds to be utilised on other priority or emergency community needs.”
Meanwhile, in February, Minister of Urban and Rural Development Erastus Utoni tabled the Regional and Constituency Development Fund Bill, which aims to tackle challenges faced by regional councils.
This, he said, will serve as a decentralisation service, which provides additional funding from the central government to the regional and constituency levels, to address grassroots social and developmental issues.
There were also complaints that planning is done at the central government level and sent to the regions for implementation, and, when some functions are delegated to the regions, it is often done with limited funding to implement them, further states the APRM report.
“Regional governments therefore use earmarked resources to try to implement programmes and projects. This has seen unspent funds being returned to the Treasury as required by the State Finance Act and Treasury instructions despite severe shortage of financial resources in other areas of need,” it said.
The APRM is an African-owned and African-led platform for self-assessment, peer-learning, and experience-sharing in democracy and good governance, in full compliance with democratic principles, human rights, rule of law, and the acceleration of political, social and efforts at economic integration in the continent.
Its primary purpose is to promote the adoption of policies, standards and practices that can lead to political stability, high economic growth, sustainable development and accelerated regional and continental economic integration through the codes and standards contained in the Declaration on Democracy, Political, Economic and Corporate Governance and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ACDEG).
Meanwhile, Namibia was commended for having well-defined structures that enable public participation in policy-making through structures such as the village development committees, district development committees, constituency development committees, regional committees and line ministries.
“There is a concern, however, about the level of actual participation of stakeholders in policy-making. Also, the participation of public and private institutions in policy discussions remains low. Stakeholder participation is often limited to matters of public finance management and oversight, with occasional public parliamentary committee meetings during which representatives of public entities are questioned on fiscal expenditures,” the report stated.
APRM cited the Open Budget Survey where Namibia is ranked low in public participation, as confirming the limitation.
“While the country scored 51 out of 100 points for overall budget transparency, countries need a minimum of 61 points to be classified as transparent in the fiscal budgetary process. It is therefore recommended that the government should find a way to advance to the next stage of decentralisation as originally conceived after independence,” it said.
“While interacting with State and non-State actors in all regions, it was found that, while all of them applaud the decentralisation policy, they feel it is not working as they had expected.”
