Op-Ed: How much will it cost President Ndayishimiye to have a successful mandate by 2027? Part1
Special Edition
This is RegionWeek Newsletter for the 4th Season (January-June 2021). The content targets Business leaders, Decision-makers, and Young professionals with interests in Burundi and East Africa.
Dear Readers,
Once upon a time, a very talented songwriter named Jeremy Riddle, wrote in his lyrics that “every dream has a process and a price tag. Those who embrace the process and pay the price, live the dream. Those who don't, just dream.” You may agree with him or not, but today as Burundians celebrate one year after they elected President Evariste Ndayishimiye, allow me to invite you to discuss Burundian dreams and political goals that we have heard over and over again. Leaders come and go and the slogans tend to remain the same.
What would be the cost have a sustainable change?
In 2020, President Evariste Ndayishimiye after forming his current cabinet announced a priority program in six points that revealed the focus of his mandate (Good governance, Public Health, Agriculture, Youth Employment, Social Protection, Peace and Reconciliation). Beyond political campaign promises, commentators saw yet another leader with beautiful words, and the question remained “will he deliver?”. The answer to that question can only be given in 2027, but today let's examine the real cost of his promises and goals.
1.Good Governance
After many years of war and unrest, the government of Burundi realized that promoting good governance was essential in ensuring stability, peace, and economic development. For these reasons, the Ministry of Good Governance and Privatisation was created in 2002. The priority was to ensure good governance in the public sector through improving the performance of public officials, fighting corruption, and promoting transparency.
Today, almost 20 years later, the good governance agenda can still be questionable in many contexts. Burundians face in a way or another the burden of poor governance and want their leaders to be held to account through genuinely democratic political systems. The challenge for President Ndayishimiye Evariste throughout his mandate will be to put in place a genuine political system that involves every Burundian in the quest for good governance and desirable outcomes such as low corruption, a good rule of law, and accountability.
As former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, “Good governance is perhaps the single most important factor in eradicating poverty and promoting development.”
President Ndayishimiye showed the will to strengthen accountability, even though it may not be a panacea for solving the numerous challenges, it is generating incentives for responsible individuals to act in the interests of the public. The price will be to keep up with this momentum, sometimes this means that ‘heads must roll’ following a major failure.
The expensive price to be paid will be to engage Burundians and civil society at the grassroots level to promote good governance and development effectiveness. It is easy for us to say that the leader we elected didn’t do much about this or that in the governance realm when those who hinder good governance are ourselves or members of our communities. We, citizens, as well need to contribute and pay the price to promote governance capabilities that will allow Burundi to emerge from poverty to prosperity.
2.Public Health Sector
Over the past two decades, Burundi has experienced improvements in certain health indicators, notably the under-five-child and maternal mortality rates, immunization coverage rates, and other key indicators. But the total public health spending is very low by the standards of Burundi’s regional peers.
In a context of limited budget resources, the key challenge for President Evariste Ndayishimiye will be to find new strategies to ensure that the resources are properly directed toward health interventions that will have health outcomes. Most activities of the national programs are funded through external resources, this has created coordination challenges during planning and implementation.
Off-budget aid flows raise transparency issues because such flows constitute an important source of sector finance, and are more difficult for MSPLS to effectively monitor.
Estimates suggest that total off-budget aid is 2-3 times higher than the government’s domestically-financed expenditures, according to the Public Expenditure Review by the World Bank.
Even though there are many challenges in the Health sector, President Ndayishimiye inherited a foundation and strategies that he can build on, among the opportunities to leverage, here we can mention the “Performance-Based Financing (PBF)” in the health sector. This Program was scaled up nationwide in 2010, with Burundi becoming the second country in Sub-Saharan Africa (after Rwanda) to implement this approach.
In the context of its new health policy (2016–2025), the government of Burundi seeks to continue and improve the PBF program by introducing funding of community health programs through the PBF.
To improve the quality of care by health facilities. President Ndayishimiye will need to come up with strategies to increase payments based on quality indicators, and less on quantity indicators. On the other hand, he will need to successfully implement an enhanced cost-containment policy to avert a spike in invoices and bonuses that often lead to PBF program deficits.
The other challenge to be tackled will be to address the low-quality care that is adversely affected by the shortages in qualified health care staff; and the lack or insufficient availability of medical equipment, drugs, and inputs for hospital and public health programs.
Burundi’s medical supply chain has three tiers: (i) a central drug purchasing unit, La Centrale d'Achats des Médicaments Essentiels et des Consommable Médicaux du Burundi (CAMEBU); which sells to district pharmacies and national hospitals(ii) district pharmacies that sell to health facilities (district hospitals and health centers); and (iii) health facilities selling to patients.
The great price to be paid will be to find effective ways to improve the performance of the supply and distribution chain of drugs and other health care inputs which remains unsatisfactory, resulting in a major impediment to value-for-money in health care services. The forecasting of essential medicines remains an issue, this, according to experts, affects CAMEBU funding levels and product availability.
According to PBF annual reports, 55 percent, 35 percent and 33 percent of health facilities experienced at least one stock outage of one or more tracer drugs, respectively in 2013, 2014 and 2015.
When it comes to coronavirus, Burundi is reporting 20 new infections on average each day, 31% of the peak, the highest daily average reported on April 18. There have been 5,082 infections and 8 coronavirus-related deaths reported in the country since the pandemic began. Burundi opted to forgo the free Covax vaccines and will wait for more research to establish the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines before administering them.
The great challenge for the Burundi President will be to encourage responsiveness to ensure that the Coronavirus misinformation is eradicated, and the number of people who are at risk of catching the disease is minimized, thus diminishing coronavirus power to spread. Here the cost will be to find out what are the realistic conditions to accept covid-19 vaccines, what are the needed resources and effective strategies to roll a successful vaccination campaign.
According to a Mckinsey briefing note, as viral-spread and economic-fallout curves both flatten in some parts of the world, signs of change and growth indicate a bright future. On the other hand, experts and modelers agree on two things: COVID-19 is here to stay, and the future depends on a lot of unknowns, including whether people develop lasting immunity to the virus, whether seasonality affects its spread, and perhaps most importantly, the choices made by governments and individuals.
- END- PART 1
How much will it cost President Ndayishimiye to have a successful mandate by 2027? Part 2: To be published on Monday, June 21, 2021
> Agriculture and Youth employment
How much will it cost President Ndayishimiye to have a successful mandate by 2027?Part3: To be published on Thursday, June 24, 2021
> Social protection, Peace and Reconciliation
Thanks for reading!
Fabrice Iranzi, Editor in Chief | RegionWeek.com
RegionWeek is an Independent media project based in Burundi that needs resources to operate at its full potential. You can contribute now, and help the RegionWeek team to publish consistently. Click this link.
Do you have other ideas on how you can help, contact us via +25771939153 (Whatsapp)
OUR NEW SERVICE
Briefing Call
(For executives, Professionals, or Investors with Interests in Burundi and East Africa)
Get Fabrice Iranzi to call you twice a week and brief you on recent news events and their impacts. Get to ask him questions and gain insight on the strategy to adopt in order to benefit from trends and upcoming events.
The first week is Free! Join today
To Check Availability and Book your calls Click here
What you get
30Min Call via Zoom
SMS and Telegram Alerts on Strategic breaking news.
Email directly with Fabrice Iranzi
Exclusive News Audio & Video commentaries
Service available in French or English
TO GET THE BRIEFING CALL CLICK HERE
Thank you very much!
Contact: editor@regionweek.com, Tel +25771939153