Addis Fortune (Addis Ababa)
Wudineh Zenebe
7 April 2008
The Ethiopian Roads Authority (ERA) stunned the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development late last week requesting a 12 billion Br budget for the 2008/2009 budget year. The Ministry of Education trails the authority with a five billion Br request.
In a request ERA tabled to MoFED on April 3, it solicited the government to allocate 10 billion birr from its coffers while the balance, according to the Authority, would be covered by a loan and grant. On the other hand, the five billion Br request by the Education ministry has been sent back for it required minor refinement.
"Although road construction is the top most agenda of the government, the Authority's budget requests have annually become enormous beyond expectation," said a source at the MoFED.
For the current budget year, ERA had requested 8.8 billion Br; 6.5 billion Br from the government as well as 1.5 billion Br and 879.6 million Br from multilateral and bilateral loans and grants respectively. The Finance Ministry headed by Minister Sufian Ahmed, however, only allocated 5.6 billion Br for the Authority; 3.5 billion Br from the government's coffer, and 1.2 billion Br from loans while 788.5 million Br was projected to be secured from grants.
In the 2007/2008 budget year, ERA has embarked on 109 road construction projects; 83 are existing projects while the remaining are new. Design and feasibility studies of 47 other projects are also part of the Authority's plan for this budget year.
New road construction projects include Addis Abeba-Nazareth, Gedo-Nekempte, Gondar-Debark, Alaba-Humbo and Humbo-Arbaminch. According to a source at the ERA, only a small budget has been allocated for these pre-construction preparation projects this budget year. The construction of these roads are planned to be carried out next budget year.
"The budget requested is too huge. I do not think it will be allocated to them," an official at the MoFED told Fortune.
The other grand budget request came from the MoE. Currently, the MoE is busy with 62 projects; 23 projects focus on higher education while 24 projects are for technical and vocational training prorammes. The remaining projects are for other education related programmes. Of the total projects, 82.8pc focuses on the expansion of higher education in the country.
Sources from the ministry disclosed to Fortune that the MoE would be aggressively acting on expansion of higher education in the next budget year as well.
The MoE had requested a 2.5 billion Br supplementary budget for this budget year, but could only secure 1.5 billion Br from MoFED.
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