By Noémia Mendes
Maputo (MOZTIMES) – The lack of prioritisation and the late allocation of financial resources is harming implementation of the Economic and Social Plan and State Budget (PESOE).
Since 2020, the budgetary execution in the health sector has been marked by downwards oscillations, which do not reach even 50 per cent of what was planned, showing a worrying deficit in the health sector’s capacity to absorb resources, according to the Citizens’ Health Observatory (OCS).
In the first half of this year, 2024, execution was only 21.3 billion meticais, out of a total of 63 billion meticais. Hence, the level of execution was only 34%. In 2020, 41% of the envisaged budget was executed, but the following year (2021) execution fell to 35%. In 2022, it reached the maximum of 45%, but in the following years (2023 and 2024) it fell to 34%.
According to the author of the research and collaborator of the Observatory in the area of Coordination of the Pillar of Financing Public Expenditure, Rogério Simango, lack of priority and late allocation are among the reasons for the poor budgetary implementation in this sector.
“What is happening is that the sector is not receiving the resources expected and is not being prioitised in terms of the timely allocation of resources, which damages execution as a whole”, he said.
Simango says that the diversion of application in comparison with what was planned is the reason why there is no ideal execution of the Economic and Social Plan and the State Budget in the country.
“On the ground we find deviations with regard to implementing what was planned in the envisaged period and the Ministries which supervise this sector, such as the Ministry of Economy and Finance and the Ministry of Health, proritise other activities”, stressed Simango.
He declared that “the construction and equipping of hospitals and other health units, and the acquisition of vehicles, among many other things depend on the capital budget, but what happens is that, to some extent, the health sector has used this investment to cover certain gaps in the operational component, particularly in the payment of wages”.
Mitigation of the crisis and the doctors’ strike
According to the OCS report on the analysis of PESOE-2024, the National Health System has passed through several crisis caused by strikes of doctors and other health professionals, who have been complaining about the increasingly precarious nature of their work in various hospitals, the shortage of medicines for patients, the deplorable state of the beds, the lack of food for hospitalised patients, and the shortage of medical and surgical material.
Simango insists that it is possible to solve the situation, if that is what the government wants – but not in the short term.
“In the short term, I think it would be very difficult to surpass the situation, because this will require grass roots work in the health sector so as to articulate and restructure some aspects which have brought these negative implications in executing the State Budget, but it is also possible for the Government to overcome this weakness in the long term, if it wants to do so". (NM)
