– Finance Minister
Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh has deemed the motion proposed by APNU’s Carl Greenidge, calling for the Supreme Court to become an autonomous body instead of a budget agency, is ‘fundamentally flawed and should have been withdrawn’. In his address at the National Assembly on Thursday, Dr Singh proffered the following reasons for his stand on the motion:
The matter of constitutional and legislative provisions governing financial operations of certain constitutional entities came up for discussion during the Government/Opposition engagement on the budget estimates. It was recognized that, given that this matter had its origins in constitutional provisions, it would require closer study and likely recourse to the Parliamentary Standing Committee for Constitutional Reform for consideration. That Committee was established pursuant to Article 119A of the Constitution for the purpose of continually reviewing the effectiveness of the working of the Constitution, and making periodic reports thereon to this Honourable House, with proposals for reform, as necessary.
In other words, given that a particular course of action was agreed to on this matter when the parties met, to persist in bringing this motion is essentially to renege on the understandings reached when the parties met, to ignore the content of those discussions, and leapfrog the process agreed to when the parties met.

In addition, the motion commits a curious sleight of hand by omitting an important part of the provision of Article 222A, namely that the budget of Schedule 3 entities shall be “approved by the National Assembly after a review and approval of the entity’s annual budget, as part of the process of the determination of the national budget”. The intention here is clear as day, to seek to ignore the constitutional requirement that the budgets of the entities concerned.
In fact, Mr. Greenidge discloses his intention to perpetuate this sleight of hand, when he discloses that his interpretation of Article 222A is that the budget of scheduled entities does not require review by either the Executive or the Parliament.

The fact of the matter is that the wording of the Constitution is not in any way consistent with the inclusion of certain bodies in the Schedule to the FMAA. Specifically, the inclusion of the Supreme Court in the Schedule to the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act 1993 is not in any way incompatible with the provisions of Article 222A of the Constitution.
In other words, Mr. Greenidge’s motion is fundamentally flawed, conveniently ignores fundamental aspects of the constitutional provisions, and therefore would result in a perverse outcome which would collide with the Constitution.