The East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) has approved $2.6 million supplementary budget intended to help meet the additional expenditure for the East African Community (EAC) for the financial year 2022-2023, among those include arears owed to organs’ staff members.

It did that by passing the EAC Supplementary Appropriation Bill (No.3), 2022, during a session held in Kigali on Friday, November 4.

This budget will mostly be spent on paying money owed to the staff of the Organs of the Community to settle unpaid allowances for the work done by their personnel. It includes over $227,000 for the East African Community Secretariat, over $75,000 for the East African Court of Justice, and more than $2.37 million for the EALA members’ arrears.

So far, EALA has 54 elected members (MPs) – with nine from each of the six EAC Partner States (Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda). This is the case because its seventh (and newest) member – the Democratic Republic of the Congo – has not yet elected its members to this EAC Parliament.

While presenting the report of the Committee on General Purpose on the supplementary budget request, MP Kennedy Ayason Mukulia said that during its consideration, it found that the Council of Ministers allocated a sum of over $2.3 million to pay outstanding arrears for Members of EALA for the sessions that were held in 2020 to 2021.

"The Committee, therefore, commends the Council of Ministers and Deputy Secretary General for Finance and Administration for paying the arrears of the members,” he said.

However, he added, the Committee further noted that the sum allocated to pay arrears was only meant for EALA Members, and the component of staff that supported the members during that activity was omitted, indicating that "the Members could not have conducted their business without the support of the technical staff.”

During the interactive meeting with the EAC Council of Ministers on the bill, he said, the Assembly and the Chairperson of the Council agreed that the Clerk to the Assembly should be able to prepare a breakdown of the arears owed to staff to be presented to the same Council for approval, but this did not happen.

The Committee further was informed by the Deputy Secretary General and the Director of Finance and Administration that the Clerk’s Office had never submitted a request for payment of staff arrears, he pointed out.

Speaking on behalf of the EAC Council of Ministers, Manasseh Nshuti, Rwanda’s Minister of State in Charge of East African Community (EAC), said that he thinks the fact that the EALA technical staff were not accommodated in the budgeting, "was a serious omission”, pointing out that it should be captured in the financial plan.

"Much as we have to pay these arrears, I implore that we also budget for our brothers and sisters who are not members of EALA, especially your assistants and those others that are not included in this budget. I implore that we really allow them to be paid because they worked with you as a team,” he told EALA members.

"We can’t budget for only members and leave out those other staff that serve this institution. They are part of us and they also should be paid,” he said.

Martin Ngoga, the Speaker of EALA, said that including technical or support staff payments in the financial plan ‘is a very important commitment on behalf of the Council’, instructing the Office of the Clerk to very quickly send the arrears records for the staff in question to the [EAC] Secretariat so that they are transferred to the Council for them to be paid.