Wide-ranging recommendations sanctioned the solution-seeking colloquium yesterday August 20.

Stakeholders involved in the public investment budget, a tool for government to reduce poverty and suffering of the population through the execution of development projects, have been urged to bury their differences, forgo individual interests and work as a team to step up the rate of execution for a more sustained socio-economic development. The Minister of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development (MINEPAT), Emmanuel Nganou Djoumessi made the appeal yesterday August 20 while closing a one-day reflection colloquium on the way out of the current dismal rate of execution of projects with the public investment budget. Over mid-way gone into the 2013 fiscal year, statistics show that the rate of execution stands at 34 per cent for engagements and 22 per cent for completion, far below projections.

A performance blamed largely on the poor mastery of the notion of result-based programme budget, poor mastery of public contracts reforms and code, the least of which is not bad faith of some actors in the chain as some old habits continue linger to on with some stakeholders still mustering the courage to block files apparently for kickbacks. Speaker after speaker castigated the immature nature of some projects presented (projects contained in the logbook without prior feasibility studies), feet-dragging of some vote holders who do not respect the prescription to forward their tender files to the Ministry of Public Contracts for the award of the contracts or worse still incomplete documents which are rejected and the entire process brought back to zero. A situation which greatly compromises the emergence vision which hinges on a proper execution of the investment budget needed to give the population durable socio-economic facilities.

After in-depth brainwork in commissions notably on topics like maturity of projects, budgetary reforms and innovations in the award of contracts as well as the expenditure chain, participants through a wide-range of reforms said change is necessary, in fact indispensable.

Harmonising and better mastering tender procedures and documents, marrying the award of contracts with the effective start of budgetary execution hopefully in January or latest February, knowing the season for particular contracts and launching them as such, getting finance controllers to always speed up with the pre-forma invoices to ascertain the availability of funds to carry on one project or the other and easing the payment of service delivery were recommended. Both actors agreed that the execution of the public investment budget is a plural-actor affair and all must put their hands on deck and look at one direction to get the 5.5 per cent annual growth rate between 2010-2020 as contained in the Growth and Employment Strategy Paper.