Icolo e Bengo – The inclusion of the civil society in the participatory budgeting, helps to set better the priorities for its application and to directly benefit the citizen, the deputy municipal administrator for the finance sector of Icolo e Bengo, Ekuikui de Morais Neto, considered Friday in Luanda Province.
The official was speaking in the town of Catete while opening the Municipal Forum on accountability and collection of contributions from the citizens with the aim to prepare a participatory budget.
To him, current experience has demonstrated the lack of spaces for citizens to participate.
For this reason, it is necessary to create conditions for their participation to actually occur by training different players of the civil society and the state for the exercise of public and democratic management.
According to the administrator, opening up new forms and channels of participation, such as this forum, requires an explicit pedagogical practice, capable of guiding the necessary process of changing attitudes, values, mentality, behaviour and procedures, both on the part of the population and on the part of the state apparatus.
For this reason, democratic issues include a strategic understanding of the ethical dimension of the way of governing and the fight against private appropriation of public affairs.
With this, he continued, the aim is to bring integrated and sustainable development to Icolo e Bengo, with the active participation of the residents.
It should be noted that this initiative is an annual practice of the Angolan government, through the ministries of Territorial Administration and Finance, with the technical support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in conjunction with civil society organisations, to implement participatory budgeting in the light of presidential decrees.
The aim of this event is to involve citizens in defining priorities when drawing up the General State Budget.
The participants discussed topics such as "The state of the fight against poverty", "PIIM projects" and the "State of budget implementation in the Icolo and Bengo Administration". AJQ/MRA
