Beyond stereotypes: the evolution of five Southern African legislatures in the budget process

ABSTRACT

The prospect that legislatures in Southern Africa would be strengthening their engagement in the annual budget process is considered far-fetched. Owing to their Westminster heritage and periods of authoritarian rule, these parliaments are typecast as weak and uninterested in serving as an institutional check on executive authority. Yet, preliminary signals suggest that a transformation may be underway. This study employs primary data collected from the Parliaments of Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in 2016/2017. Results support the hypothesis that these anglophone African legislatures are becoming more involved in the budget process, particularly at the ex-ante phase, though to varying degrees and with continued challenges. Evidence also suggests progress past certain features of the UK-inherited budget system, despite enduring institutional constraints. This study takes us beyond stereotypes that limit the potential of these institutions to their historical scaffolding and contributes to our understanding of their evolution.

KEYWORDS:

• Legislatures
• Africa
• budget process
• institutional evolution

Acknowledgments

This research was made possible by the generous time and support provided by the staff and Members of the Parliaments of Namibia, Lesotho, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia and the insights garnered from the DFID Project: Strengthening SADC Parliaments in the Budget Cycle (2015-2017). The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation (NRF) towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the NRF. The authorwould also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The investigation focuses exclusively on the expenditure side of the annual budget; parliamentary consideration of budget revenue estimates and proposed changes in tax policies are not examined.

2 Nijzink et al. (2006) applied the initial findings from the survey work of the African Legislatures Project (ALP) and constitutional coding to determine the institutional capacity of 16 African legislatures. Results ‘generally confirm the conventional wisdom about Africa’s governments: weak parliaments are faced with strong presidents and ‘combined with generally low levels of parliamentary resources, this means that the institutional capacity of African parliaments to hold strong presidents to account is fairly limited.’

3 Early case studies (Engholm 1963), (Hopkins 1970) and comparative works like those of (Stultz 1968) (Hakes and Helgerson 1973) (Baaklini 1976) and (Mezey 1983) provide important contextual baselines. More recently, a small number of case studies have come to scatter the landscape (Murray and Nijzink 2002)(Barkan 2005) (Thomas and Sissokho 2005) (Melber 2005). But even of these, few, like Burnell (2002) are published in major peer-reviewed journals and only two have applied a cross-national approach to the study of legislatures in Africa (Nijzink et al. 2006).

4 Aside from the question of whether the legislature or the executive controls the budget, a central concern amongst scholars relates to the potential risks of overspending should legislatures become involved in budget formulation (Schick 2002: 16).

5 The practitioner literature adds significantly to this list. See (Levy & Kpundah 2004) (CABRI 2008) (Stapenhurst et al. 2011) (Rotberg and Salahub 2013).

6 Chapter three of CABRI (2008) applies Wehner’s 2006 index of budgetary powers to the study of African legislatures on the basis of legal coding of both executive and legislative budgetary powers. This study differs in that the data is based on actual behaviours in historical context. The focus is also placed exclusively on the legislature.

7 Although Mezey (1979) includes the additional element of popular support to the mix, the ‘reactive’ and ‘active’ legislatures largely overlap with that of Polsby (1975).

8 For a challenge to this conceptualisation of the UK Parliament on the basis of less visible signs of policy influence, see Russell and Cowley (2016).

9 The House of Lords also lost its ability to deal with ‘money bills’ in the early 20th century (Norton 1998, 156).

10 See von Trapp et al. (2016), Box 1, 244-245.

11 However an Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) was introduced in 2012 which, inter alia, prepares the Government’s official economic and fiscal forecasts and conducts medium-term fiscal sustainability analyses.

12 Parliamentary questions include: departmental question time, inter-departmental question time, prime minister's questions, private notice questions, and questions following ministerial statements (Shepard 2004, 42).

13 The author is grateful to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point.

14 The Parliament of Namibia differs from the other legislatures in terms of its historic ties to the UK. Namibia was a German colony, and then later under the oversight of the South African apartheid government from 1919-1989. Its system of governance was thus based indirectly on that of Westminster system, with France and Egypt reportedly also serving as models for the semi-presidential system ultimately chosen by the Constituent Assembly at independence (See Appendix 1: Case Selection).

15 The project was designed to instigate reflection amongst five SADC parliaments on their engagement in the budget process from a comparative perspective. It was managed by this author, with financial support provided by UK Aid (2015-2017). Interviewees were aware that their responses would feed into this wider process of regional parliamentary reflection, that the information fielded would be vetted by peers, and that their parliaments would be the first recipients of this data. Ethical clearance for this research was granted retrospectively from the Political Studies Ethics Committee of the University of Cape Town on 16 April 2018.

16 Interviewees were selected on the basis of their budgetary roles and responsibilities. Diversity was sought in terms of party affiliation, sex, tenure, age, and chamber (where relevant). Input from full-time members of parliament was privileged, including backbenchers and members of the opposition. The percentage of backbenchers in each legislature ranged from 60% - 92% at the time of data collection. (see Appendix 2: Interviewees)

17 Only after the data collection process is complete are these checked against the countries’ legal frameworks (See Appendix 3: Legal Powers).

18 This study assumes that legislative budgetary practices have remained essentially unchanged throughout periods of authoritarian rule. This is because of the extreme unlikelihood that any changes instituted during this time would lead to strengthened budgetary engagement on the part of the legislature.

19 Institutionalisation is understood here as a point at which ‘legislative structures and routines gradually achieve stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and sustainability in a polity based upon cognitions, agreed-upon norms, and the embeddedness of the legislature’s patterns in a supporting social system’ (Camino 2013).

20 The Parliament of Lesotho was suspended from mid-2015 due to political instability precipitated by election results and subsequent (alleged) mutiny of members of the armed forces. At the time of data collection, the legislature was awaiting the return of opposition leaders who had fled to South Africa, and was not fully operational. It is thus unclear whether or not the practices instigated in 2012 have been carried over into the current dispensation.

21 The ‘development budget’ relates to expenditure on national development including investment projects and capital expenditure; much, but not all, of the ‘recurrent budget’ relates to operational costs of government and includes current expenditures for goods and services consumed in a 12 month period.

22 Each parliament studied here maintains the legal authority to decrease the development budget while none hold the formal power to affect increases. The Parliament of Malawi may, however, increase ‘the Protected Expenditure Fund,’ which encompasses executive salaries and parliamentary running costs (Constitution 2010, Article 183 (1)). The exception is Zambia, where Parliament may make amendments across votes while remaining within the confines of overall spending ceilings. Amendments to recurrent expenditure and revenue policy are prohibited across cases.

23 Two examples documented the 2017 Budget Speech are: the proposal from the Portfolio Committee on Environment, Water, Tourism and Hospitality and Finance and Economic Development Committee to ‘provide raw water to agriculture and industries through completing critical dam projects as well as increasing access to potable water for rural and urban populations’ to which the executive earmarked USD 25.8 million for the construction and maintenance of several dams (Paragraph 250) and the appropriation of USD 26.4 million towards water and sanitation programmes (Paragraph 254) (Minister of Finance and Economic Development 2016).

24 The level of informal influence parliament exerts the executive budget is not something that can be easily measured, documented or traced, particularly in the parliamentary setting. MPs and staff of the parliaments concerned, are best placed to both identify and interpret instances of legislative budgetary influence.

25 CDFs are funding streams appropriated by Members of Parliament (MPs) at or before the formal adoption of the national budget for the purpose of funding small to medium scale development projects in MP constituencies, across party lines. No two CDFs are structurally identical; they vary in a variety of ways including their amounts, origins, purposes and management structures, amongst other attributes (Baskin 2014: 6).

26 There was a lapse in practice over the course of the data collection period because the executive was not distributing funding to its line ministries, but this does not detract from the overarching trend.

27 Parliament of Malawi SROs (2013): ‘Any committee may make any inquiry into annual reports’ (166.1.b). ‘The Budget Committee shall engage the Ministry of Finance in … monitoring the budget throughout its cycle ‘(158.f).

Additional information

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Kristen Heim

Kristen A. Heim is specialist on institutional change in African legislatures. She completed her PhD at the University of Cape Town and is presently a postdoctoral researcher in political science at the University of Stellenbosch. Her research focuses on questions related to the evolution of African legislatures, the diffusion of legislative practices and norms, public finance, and gender. She has over 10 years experience in supporting legislatures across Africa from a development perspective, with a special focus on comparative budgetary engagement, and has produced related content for the German Development Agency (GIZ), the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), and the World Health Organisation (WHO).