The finance minister has stated at a roundtable discussion recently that the rate of budget implementation has come down which sends an ominous signal for the country's development. The government has been toying around with various reform programmes to enhance implementation capacity, none of which has borne fruit. The fact that the ministry has failed to come up with a plan to have a pool of project directors for the last two years speaks volumes of the pace of decision-making in the administration.

Another major bottleneck for the budget is the unrealistic revenue projections made. The NBR was given a target that was 40 percent higher than the collection of the previous fiscal 2016-17, which was overly ambitious and indeed, the target had to be trimmed down. Where there have been no new efforts made to increase the tax net, precisely how the government expected to draw up such increase in revenue generation remains a matter of debate.

The general decline in implementation is directly related to the years of neglect of human capital in the various institutions and agencies of the government which has landed us in a situation where there is very little possibility of projects to be implemented in a timely fashion. The quality of the bureaucracy can improve when merit prevails over political consideration. Otherwise, the situation may be aggravated to the point where project timelines are set back by years. Until we can do something to reverse this trend, development project completion will keep missing deadlines.