In our article of 3 April 2023, we stated that the contract for the production of electronic ID cards was also in breach of sections 16 and 30(1) of the Fiscal Management and Accountability (FMA) Act. The latter prohibits the award of a contract if there is no budgetary allocation to meet the related expenditure:
No contract or other arrangement providing for the payment of public moneys with respect to any programme for which there is an appropriation or an item included in the annual budget proposal then before the National Assembly to which that payment is to be charged, shall be entered into unless there is a sufficient unencumbered balance available in the appropriation or the proposed budget item, as the case may be, to make that payment.
