Suppliers of goods and services to the Government have a serious complaint against the office of the Director of the Treasury in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, which is the office of one Francois Nkurikiyinfura. The allegation is that this office has a chronic failure to clear payments timely and efficiently.

Businesspeople we talked to about this matter seemed to share one complaint more than any other: that Nkurikiyinfura seems to be of the attitude that by signing off on your pay he is doing you a favor. This kind of primitive attitude has absolutely no place in today’s Rwanda.

The cases that we have investigated are many and we ask the concerned authorities to do something urgently if our objectives of Vision 2020 are not to be derailed by activities such as those in Minecofin directorate of The Treasury.

We will give a few examples. A businessperson winning a tender will get a quick overdraft from the bank to supply the required goods, say potatoes and other foodstuffs to feed prisoners somewhere, or to engage in similar business such as supplying said prison firewood. Or a businessperson will be awarded a contract to build several school blocks in a few primary schools. He or she will then proceed with the work.

But what does the office of the Director of the Treasury, Mr. Nkurikiyinfura do? Does it immediately process that business’s payments? Not at all.

Chances are that it will be two or three months before the potato supplier or the constructor of classrooms gets the first payment. (Please be informed that these days two weeks maximum is the acceptable delayed period of pay, and that is if an error is discovered in an invoice or something like that. Otherwise there is no reason payment should take more than a week if the money is in the government’s budget).

In those months as the supplier waits for his pay the bank will be breathing down the poor fellow’s neck to pay up on his short term loan or overdraft. And of course the interest on the overdraft keeps accumulating.

What happens next is that the desperate businessperson will go to Minecofin to follow up on payments, thus wasting valuable time in an activity he or she shouldn’t be troubled with since contracts have been signed.

We know of cases where business people travel all the way from Cyangugu, Gisenyi, any other upcountry place to go to Minecofin to “gukurikirana amafaranga yabo”.

The spectacle of busy people dropping everything else to chase after payments really has no place in a society that has made service delivery a watchword, moreover a society that more than most will depend on the success of private businesses to attain an equitable level of prosperity for all.

It is very strange that some concerned people seem unconcerned that over-delayed payments can and do lead to small businesses failing.  

Having said all this we cannot fail to mention that in all fairness Minecofin in the past few years seems to be getting its act together.

Cases where the corridors of the ministry would be full of businesspeople as supplicants begging for their pay are now history. One can attribute this change to the fact other departments of the ministry have progressed. They process their part of the paperwork promptly, a process more expeditiously executed with savvy use of IT.

The only office that seems to be left behind by progress is the office of the Director of the Treasury.  

This office will have to explain why when some poor businessperson travels from Cyangugu his immediate staff will for example tell the man to “go and come back another time because now we are processing salaries.” We need to learn whether life has to stop because some people are processing salaries.

We want to become a service oriented society and it is unbelievable that we still have people who have such disregard of others. In any case, why should anyone even have to travel from Cyangugu (mark you we are talking about upcountry, but the situation is the same with Kigali-based businesses) at all?

Finance Minister James Musoni told this newspaper that a) he gave explicit instructions that processing salaries should never delay suppliers’ pay and b) payments have been decentralized and businesses dealing with government should be paid from their districts.

So what is the discrepancy?

We asked the director of The Treasury and he told us he cannot say anything about payments without the permission of Minister Musoni. Why? We asked.

Mr. Nkurikiyinfura only said that is the way things are.

We thought this man was dodging questions; we thought he wasn’t being accountable and transparent to the public.

But regarding problems with pay, we can only talk so much about the director of The Treasury. Other institutions have to take a share of the blame.

We know for example that different government institutions also make life difficult by not taking up the responsibility to press the director of The Treasury to process suppliers’ pay quickly.

A ministry, for example Mineduc, will only complicate matters when they instruct a supplier – say the one who built the classrooms – who is asking for his money to “go to Finance”.

In such a case it should be the duty of Mineduc to press Nkurikiyinfura or whoever else is director of The Treasury to process the supplier’s pay.

People should take a proactive approach to solving problems. In such a way, even those individuals who think a government office is a personal office will have to shape up, or ship out.

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