Politicians responsible for excessive costs spent by the State on rental of administrative buildings, Prime Minister

Ouagadougou: Prime Minister Me Apollinaire Joachimson Kyelem of Tambela accused politicians of having used schemes to plunder public resources through increasingly high expenditure on state rental buildings for administrative use.'The politicians ensured that the State had no premises and (that) they themselves built premises which they rented to the State and that, at enormous sums' accused the Prime Minister before his agents gathered in a general meeting yesterday Thursday.While his staff expressed the need for new premises, the Prime Minister recalled that the current policy of the State is to limit the rental of buildings which are very expensive for the State. For him, renting buildings rather than building them was a 'politicians' policy' and is no longer on the agenda.Throughout 2023, the government set about denouncing the lavish expenditure on state administrative leases and seeking to reduce them through the implementation of a state real estate program.From January 2023, the Minister in ch arge of Finance, Aboubacar Nacanabo, announced that his department will be responsible for 'taking stock of the occupation of these buildings, identifying unoccupied buildings, insufficiently occupied buildings and carrying out a reorganization to make so that we can optimize without having to continue to rent other buildings.Then, a decree regulating administrative leases in Burkina Faso was adopted in March 2023 by the council of ministers.'It appears that from 2017 to 2022, we went from 5.4 billion FCFA to almost 9 billion FCFA for administrative leases. Which is very high for the State, this is why it is necessary to review the regulations to ensure that they rationalize and establish more transparency,' explained Minister Nacanabo.And last December, the government announced the construction of a 10-story building with a capacity of 600 offices, to absorb a large part of the public administration's needs for premises. At a cost of 13.9 billion FCFA, the building is supposed to help the State save on e billion FCFA each year on building rental expenses.Occasional initiatives to construct large administrative blocks in Ouagadougou and other regions as well as the rehabilitation of old buildings emerged in 2009 and 2010, without closing the subject.Investigative media have estimated the amounts spent by the Burkinabe state at 45 billion FCFA, between 2017 and 2022, to cover the costs of the buildings it has rented.Source: Burkina Information Agency