Where are the �good times�?

From the P14 billion proposed under the development budget for the coming financial year, Matambo only mentioned a handful of projects under the stimulus programme amounting to a total of a mere P1.3 billion.

In the absence of proper information and communication from government, we can only assume that Matambo could not have omitted mentioning ESP’s biggest projects and that the P1.3 billion projects he alluded to could be just about it for the year up to March 2017. At this stage we will want to resist to assume that government may take the highly undesirable route in public finance management of carrying out projects off budget. At the top of the list of things that were conspicuously absent from Matambo’s speech was a definite total amount of the ESP.