The Director of National Budget in the Ministry of Finance Mr Tasima Jah has cautioned the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Cooperation (SLBC) to tailor their Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 Budget to programs they’ve already started in FY 2020.
Mr. Jah made this clarion call on Friday 9th October during the ongoing budget process at the Ministry of Finance Conference Hall in Freetown.
According to the Budget Director, the SLBC should limit their FY 2021Budget to the completion of projects they have already started.
“We are going to focus on things we were not been able to deliver in 2020 so that by the end of 2021 we should be able to point at things that we would have delivered on,” he said.
He calls on the SLBC team to go back and remove the new projects in their budget and focus on deliverables they’ve already started.
“Delivery is starting a few projects and follow it to completion and not starting several projects and complete none of them,” he said.
The FY 2020 uncompleted deliverables for SLBC among them is the digital migration, reduce liabilities, and improved revenue base.
According to the SLBC Director-General Esq. Joseph E. Kapuwa, their key deliverables for FY 2021 are, success to digital migration by December 2021, universal presence by September 2021, twenty-four hours broadcast by March 2021, additional studios & substations across the country by June 2021, international partnership programs by September 2021.
He said the SLBC is faced with challenges of inadequate equipment, dilapidated work tools, inconsistencies with remunerations, unattractive conditions of service, understaffed, issues of security for the assets, insufficient of capacity building platforms, lack of title deeds, challenges in accessing funds for activities and challenges in the migration process from analog-digital.
The SLBC is requesting Le 3,535,000,000 for the FY 2