On transparency and accountability in managing public money / Omar Shaban

By: Omar Shaban

The concept of the state: according to multiple definitions of the state: it is a people settled on a defined territory and subject to a defined political authority. The principal elements of the state, indispensable for a state's existence, are: the people, the land, and the authority. The state's function may be summed up as organising and managing society and employing the available resources in society's service — committed to indispensable standards and foundations such as: the existence of a governing constitution binding on all, equality of opportunity and equality, the rule of law and the protection of the marginalised groups, the equality of all before the law, and the separation of the judicial, legislative, and executive powers, and other principles and systems.

The concepts of transparency, oversight, and accountability lie at the heart of the system humanity has developed to protect itself from itself. The people choose their representatives in parliament in democratic atmospheres open to all, and delegate to it the following of the management of their affairs; parliament oversees the executive agencies of which the state is formed; the citizen pays taxes and abides by the agreed laws; the judiciary oversees all; and the law or the constitution organises the relation and defines the responsibilities, duties, and rights of each party toward the other. This system of institutions and laws is subject to an important rule: all oversee and follow all — with the aim of preventing despotism or the monopoly of power by any party. Human nature loves power and influence; therefore these laws binding on all were laid down and drafted with everyone's approval, in what is called the “social contract”, which defines the powers and responsibilities of each party of the system. Thus the foundations of transparency and oversight are the spirit all must enjoy and abide by.

What is transparency:- the United Nations defines transparency as “the freedom of the flow of information and knowledge in its widest concepts and to an ideal degree — that is, providing complete information in a way that allows stakeholders at all levels and fields of work to obtain the information necessary for taking the suitable decisions and avoiding and discovering mistakes. Transparency aims to create a healthy environment in which complete information is available on all in what relates to the decisions, policies, laws, and practices taken by all official, civil, and private bodies. Transparency is not only upon the state's agencies but includes parliament, private-sector institutions, civil-society organisations, and the syndicates.

What is accountability:- accountability means, according to the United Nations: asking officials to offer the necessary clarifications to stakeholders on how they use their powers, defining their duties, taking on board the criticisms directed at them, meeting the requirements asked of them, and accepting (some) responsibility for failure, incompetence, deception, or fraud. The summary of this definition is that accountability rests on the right of those concerned — the people, the members of the general assembly, or the shareholders for example — to obtain the necessary information on officials' works in what relates to the management of their interests, and to demand that they offer the necessary clarifications to stakeholders on how they use their powers and duties in managing their resources.

In the Palestinian case: among the fundamental tasks of the state in its modern concept is laying down a general budget comprising all the items of the available resources and the outlets of their spending. In the Palestinian case this was organised by the Basic Law: according to article (1) of law number (7) of 1998, “the general budget is a detailed programme of the National Authority's expenditures, its grants, loans, and other receipts, and the different expenditures and payments”. The budget's functions are:

• The most important of the tools of fiscal policy, reflecting the government's political and development programme.
• One of the important tools for achieving justice and equality among the sons of the one people.
• The state's tool for doing justice to the marginalised and weak groups through positive discrimination toward them.
• A tool of planning, implementation, and oversight of public money.

The division's repercussions on the state of transparency and accountability:

• The political division of June 2007 caused a strong blow to the state of transparency and accountability in the Palestinian case: the political system split into two contending systems, one in the Gaza Strip and the other in the governorates of the West Bank, and each came to have a government apparatus and a general budget of its own. The government apparatus of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah numbered 170,000, and about 40,000 in the former Gaza government. With the division, the “dismissed” Gaza government began preparing a separate budget for Gaza, while the Palestinian Authority's government in Ramallah prepares a general budget of its own including Gaza partially.
• The division led to the suspension of the legislative power's role (the Legislative Council) entirely, and hence its role in overseeing the budget. The Legislative Council, through the Change and Reform bloc in Gaza, came to enact laws without the president's ratification of them, and president Mahmoud Abbas was given the power to issue laws and decisions without the Legislative Council's ratification of them.
• The self-adoption of the budget: the former Gaza government would present the budget bill and lay it before the Legislative Council in Gaza, most of whose deputies are of the Change and Reform movement, while the government in Ramallah would ratify its own budget bill by itself. It must be affirmed that self-ratification of the budget is an unconstitutional matter.
• The division formed a golden opportunity for many international institutions to evade official and communal oversight, benefiting from the Authority's absence in Gaza and pleading the no contact policy — there being no longer any real oversight of the cash and in-kind assistance from the donor bodies; many international donor institutions refuse full disclosure of their programmes and assistance.
• The retreat of the civil organisations' oversight role and the retreat of attention to the laws and decisions issued by the two governments, because of preoccupation with internal matters and preserving the civil organisations' conditions under the blockade and the division.
• The preparation of a separate budget stopped soon after the formation of the consensus government, under an agreement between the “Fatah” and “Hamas” movements on the eve of the consensus government's formation at the start of June 2014.

Thus the foundations of transparency and accountability were among the first victims of the Palestinian division.

August 2017 .