President Gustavo Petro, the Minister of Commerce, Germán Umaña; Vice President Francia Márquez; Senator María José Pizarro; and the Minister of Cultures, Juan David Correa.
Photo: Jonathan Bejarano
The low budget execution reported in 2023 is the shadow that does not abandon Gustavo Petro’s government. While facing investigations in the National Electoral Council (CNE) and the magnifying glass of the Prosecutor’s Office in the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (Ungrd), the Executive has opted for a strategy that focuses on the contracts it has signed. the Government, instead of the payments or obligations it has acquired. Thus, they would seek to direct their gaze towards percentages that would have nothing to envy of past administrations and demonstrate that “change” is advancing.
The last to give way to this new path were the Ministers of Cultures, Juan David Correa, and Commerce, Industry and Tourism, Germán Umaña, who appeared before the Third Commission of the Senate to defend the decisions they have made with their entities and Emphasize that it is a question of seeing the glass half full or half empty.
“There are ways to tell the problem,” Correa said. “It is focusing, again and again, on what has been executed and not what has been committed.”
The data revealed that 2023 was the year with the lowest execution in 21 years, excluding the pandemic. Senator Efraín Cepeda (Conservative Party), who presented the data at the beginning of April, had already summoned the Ministers of the Environment, Housing, Science and Sports on the same topic. In the presentation of his presentation, he indicated that for the first quarter of 2024, the expected percentage of execution by entity is 33.3%, which neither MinCommerce (17.9%) nor MinCulturas (15.9%) they had fulfilled. However, for the officials mentioned, these data do not show the work that their portfolios have done in these five and a half months of the year.
“Here there are commitments from the Ministry of Culture, at this time of the year, to satisfy that 33% that Senator Cepeda insisted on again and again. There is good news, we are at a commitment of 38.5% today, that means, signed contracts, which will not be breached,” Correa noted.
We suggest: Opposition summoned Carlos Ramón González to political control debate
The Minister of Commerce, for his part, emphasized that how each portfolio worked had to be taken into account in order to make a more accurate analysis of what was happening for such low figures. In his case, he explained that “it doesn’t seem fair that [sigan] looking at the issue of ‘obliging’ as budget execution, and less on the issue of investment.”
“The only thing we have learned in the past is that one should never give advances against investment contracts, because unfortunately those advances have not had the best behavior in the past, not to mention that it was a disaster,” he indicated. “An investment project can transcend several budget periods and that has to be paid according to the milestones that occur in the investment.”
Ministers have agreed that their cabinets have had to start building from scratch. At the beginning of April, the Minister of Environment, Susana Muhamad, explained that with the Government came a change in the methodology of environmental investments, which implied “a reconfiguration of the sector.” This Tuesday, Umaña pointed out that her team came to a portfolio that, “in the last 30 years, had [planteado] a growth policy and a sustainable development policy”, so they had to begin to build the transition from a “simply energy model to a sustainable development model”.
One of those summoned for this debate, as Minister of Equality, had been Vice President Francia Márquez, after the news of the decision of the Constitutional Court that left without effect the law that gave life to her ministry for a “insurmountable procedural defect”. Last week, Márquez attended another political control debate at the Commission for Women’s Equality, where she was also questioned about the poor execution of her portfolio.
You may be interested in: “We did not come to manage what they left”: Racero on letters from former ministers to Petro
“This is a ministry that is under construction. It has been a hundred years since an institution has been built from scratch and in record time we have projects to begin execution,” he stated. “Going through those procedures to give an answer is not possible. “I am formulating the projects within the established time, we are defining the investment projects and creating teams.”
The members of the “Government of Change” have been emphatic that their rise to power brought with it a new way of doing politics. As it was the first time that the left and progressivism came to run the country, as Senator María José Pizarro (Historical Pact) explained, they needed to build a different way of governing that would be distinguished from those “practices that have been established by those who have made part of traditional politics in Colombia”, which “is not simple either because it is the way in which power has been built and the State has been built for decades.”
Pizarro understands “the criticism of inexperience, the reflection on assuming learning curves very quickly, of even learning to govern,” but, in any case, he points out, the opposition criticizes them “for a lot of situations.” Transforming this way of doing politics is not so easy: “changing that is not like making a clean slate, in any case there are laws, there is a State that has been built and built and there are many things to change.”
“I believe that we have to try to make the exercise of governance an increasingly transparent exercise, an increasingly more agile exercise, closer to the people, a Government that can dialogue with the population,” he says.
Also read: “Congressmen from this and other periods were involved”: Carrillo on the UNGRD case
This change in the way of understanding the Government’s action in each portfolio occurs at a key moment. Last week the Government was under public scrutiny due to the report filed in the CNE that, if approved, would file charges against the president’s campaign for violation of electoral limits. All this in the midst of the scandal in the Ungrd, in which the presidents of the Senate—Iván Name (Alianza Verde)—and of the Chamber—Andrés Calle (Liberal Party)—are allegedly involved, as well as the former presidential advisor for the Regions, Sandra Ortiz. With a wave of events that would affect government officials, the president asked his ministers to show results and make sure that Colombians feel that the “change” is happening.
?? Find out how senators and representatives to the House vote in ‘Congress at hand’.
? Read more about Congress, the Petro government and other news from the political world.
✉️ If you are interested in political issues or information that you consider appropriate to share with us, please write to us at any of these emails: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; or [email protected].
