The Chamber of Deputies on Wednesday, May 13, 2020 started an extraordinary session which Speaker Donatille Mukabalisa said will focus on, among other things, the consideration of the Auditor General (AG)’s report and the draft law for the 2020/2021 fiscal year budget. The AG’s report on the audit of state finances in the last financial year which ended on June 30, 2019 will be presented to a joint parliament plenary on Friday, May 15. The session began with the adoption of a bill approving the €91.4 million (about Rwf93 billion) loan agreement between the Republic of Rwanda and the World Banks International Development Association (IDA). This was one of the issues on the agenda in the extraordinary session expected to last for 15 days. The loan is intended for energy development in Rwanda. All the 78 MPs who had attended the sitting at Parliamentary Buildings in Kigali approved it. They were all wearing masks and complied with the recommended physical distancing of at least one meter between one and another as a precautionary measure to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. The current fiscal year will come to an end on June 30, 2020, while the next one will start on July 1, 2020, which is almost one month and a half ahead. Mukabalisa also said that the parliament will receive a report by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on National Budget and Patrimony on the countrywide assessment tours it carried out to evaluate the execution of the current national budget in the first half of the financial year. Another point for discussion is the consideration of the law governing public institutions. The session comes after over a month of no sittings at Parliament because of the lockdown induced by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 — COVID-19, which restricted parliamentary work. The lockdown was ordered on March 21, 2020 as one of the measures to curb the spread of the viral respiratory disease, and eased on May 4, 2020. “Normally, if there was not COVID-19 problem, the budget draft law [for the next fiscal year] would have been submitted to parliament [for assessment]. But, we are still waiting for it. Once it has been approved by the cabinet, it will be sent to us [Parliament],” she said. “We also have to receive the report of the Auditor General before the start of the review of the [next] national budget,” she said. “The content of the report of the Committee on National Budget and Patrimony on the evaluation of the use of the national budget helps us [as law makers] to give views on the national budget draft law based on the funds that were provided to institutions and activities on which they spent it in order to decide on the next budget allocations to them,” she said. As provided for by the Constitution and the organic law governing Parliamentary operations, the Parliament is supposed to hold three ordinary sessions. The first starts from February 5, and concludes on April 4, the second from June 5 to August 4, while the third is from October 5 to December 4. “When we conclude such ordinary sessions, yet urgent issues emerge in the meantime, we should hold extraordinary sessions in order to examine them,” Mukabalisa said, explaining that the layer should not exceed 15 days each.
