15TH ANNUAL SADCOPAC CONFERENCE BEGINS IN DURBAN

The much-anticipated 15th Annual Conference of Southern African Development Community Organisation of Public Accounts Committees (SADCOPAC) is currently underway in Durban. SADC member countries have gathered for three days to exchange best practices and reflect on new financial oversight approaches. The conference also wants to raise awareness of common challenges around the management of the public purse.

The apex responsibility of this coordinating structure of SADC public accounts committees is to scrutinise their governments’ financial expenditure patterns to ensure that there is value for money, transparency and accountability in how the executives of their nation states spend taxpayers’ money.

In his keynote address, the SADCOPAC Chairperson, Mr Warren Mwambazi, Chairperson of Zambia’s Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, stressed that the chief aim of the conference is to deliberate on the ways of enhancing oversight for advanced ethical public financial management, governance and accountabi
lity to promote Africa’s development.

He further stated that since its inception 20 years ago, SADCOPAC has been a voice of prudent financial management of public funds in the SADC region, a voice premised on accountability, good governance, and good governance among its member states. This conference, he stated, will provide its member states with ‘an ideal platform to assess the evolution of oversight on public financial management, governance, and accountability over the last two decades.’

Mr Mwambazi went on to say that SADCOPAC has done so autonomously. ‘It has asserted its autonomy in exercising oversight on the governments in SADC countries for them to meet the expectations of the people for sound and accountable governance, by continuously facilitating efficient spending and promoting sound financial management practices.’

He also proclaimed that the conference will also adopt SADCOPAC’s long-term programme premised on its strategic objectives of strengthening oversight on financial management
and accountability by individual public accounts committees in SADC countries, and to take SADCOPAC to greater heights in its role of coordinating it members, working with its partners in SADC, and influencing issues of oversight on financial management and accountability in Africa and internationally.

The conference programme will focus on nine priority areas for discussion. The session for the first areas will focus on the evolution of public financial accountability in the southern Africa region. It will also look at the role of SADCOPAC in coordinating and building capacity of public accounts committees (PACs) to strengthen ex-ante oversight.

Tied to that will be a focus on the theme of public sector coordinated partnership for enhanced ethical public financial management and accountability. In this plenary, Mr Mwambazi said, members of SADCOPAC will ‘focus on the public institutions established by legislation to ensure enhanced ethical standards in public financial management and accountability are ad
vanced.’

The involvement of civil society in safeguarding ethical public financial management culture in SADC will be another part of the conference’s thematic area, he said.

Delegates will also deliberate on how SADCOPAC could extend its ethical public financial management ethos. This thematic session titled ‘Positioning of SADCOPAC for Enhanced Oversight on Public Financial Management and Accountability in Africa and Globally’, will discuss the role that should be played by SADCOPAC as a coordinating body, in directing, influencing, and advocating for ethical public financial management and accountability in Africa, the Commonwealth and globally, Mr Mwambazi said.

In keeping with the new world order premised on the 4th Industrial Revolution, said the chairperson, SADCOPAC will further deliberate on how its sister committees should reposition and repurpose themselves to embrace the efficiencies of current technology developments to advance their constitutional mandates.

This conference will, Mr Mwamba
zi said, also shine a light on how public accounts committees of SADC can strengthen their oversight to advance financial management and accountability on the development objectives of their respective countries and the continent enshrined in African Union (AU) Agenda 2063. He clarified the significance of the theme on the sstrengthened Oversight to advance financial management and accountability on the developmental objectives of Africa. ‘This is with the acknowledgement that all countries have their development goals, which should be the derived from the objective of achieving the global development goals. The African states should also prioritise the AU Agenda 2063.’

The move towards the public account committees of the future themed: Building Appropriate Capacity for Effective PACs, will receive special attention during these plenaries, Mr Mwambazi maintained. ‘Here we will assess the mandate and functions of PACs, the structures of PACs, proposals on areas to strengthen PACs for the future and the role
of SADCOPAC in building capacity of PACs.’

The increasing realisation of the effects of illicit financial flows on nation states’ budgets and the urgency to foster a social compact between the public and private sector and the renewed role of PACs in arresting this financial calamity will also be discussed, Mr Mwambazi concluded.

Source: Parliament of South Africa