Economist Calls For Early Budget Disclosure To Be Decriminalised

Economist Chibamba Kanyama has called on the government to decriminalise the early publication of key public documents such as the national budget.

It follows a police investigation into the early release of finance minister Bwalya Ng’andu’s budget speech by Diamond TV journalists hours before the speech was due to be delivered in the National Assembly last month.

Mr Kanyama has advised that any laws prohibiting the early disclosure of such documents be revised so that government can more properly be held to account. 

“With regard to National Budgets, a lot has changed in terms of content and the communication profile. Under the centralized ‘Kaunda’ system, budgets were a solemn and tightly controlled event. This was primarily because governments played a central role in controlling the economy, particularly with regard to price setting,” he said.

Mr Kanyama added that a lot had changed since then and that government now largely directs the economy through targets and policies.

“First, you can easily predict the budget via the medium term expenditure framework (a national budget with a long term view). That’s why when journalists ask me to predict the budget, I just go to this document, which often gets revised and then consider the prevailing economic circumstances to make predictions.”

“Second, government makes a lot of consultations with various stakeholders for budget input. In short, today’s budgets are very predictable (I did not listen to the 2021 National Budget presentation because the MTEF was enough for me to know the broader context).”

Given the ease of predicting budget, Mr Kanyama says that it would be advisable for government to decriminalise early disclosure, “so that officers found wanting can be reprimanded administratively.”