FNC mulls federal budget issues

UAQ member Ali Jassim criticises lack of initiatives in the Ministry of Education’s draft budget for creating Emirati teachers.

FNC member Ali Jassim is critical of the Ministry of Education for the lack of focus on vocational training. Mona Al Marzooqi / The National

ABU DHABI // The Ministry of Education’s budget lacks incentives to encourage Emiratis to become teachers, and does not focus on vocational training – these are some of the issues the Federal National Council will discuss before it passes its 2016 federal budget draft law.

The council will discuss the 33-article federal bill during Tuesday’s session.

The Cabinet has approved a Dh48.57 billion federal budget for next year, mainly focusing on social development, education and health.

When the FNC discusses the draft law, no changes should be made to any figures or amounts, but the issues at its core will be debated, said Umm Al Quwain member Ali Jassim.

“The budget of the education ministry did not include any initiative with regards to encouraging nationals to enter the teaching profession,” he said.

“The budget also did not include any initiatives that focus on vocational education,” he said.

As for the Ministry of Social Affairs’ budget, “it was all a weak presentation”.

Mr Jassim provided an example, in which the ministry’s allocation of Dh334,554 for a study on family violence had been placed under “salaries”.

“In 2015 they did the same thing, they put this issue under salaries.”

He said that the ministry was not convinced that family abuse exists, “so when we, the Human Rights Committee, made field visits we discovered that there is abuse, not only on children, but also on women and the elderly”.

“Thus we changed the name [of the issue] to ‘family abuse’.”

The Government then took responsibility for the issue from the Ministry of Social Affairs and gave it to the ministries of Justice and Interior to discuss it, he said.

“So this we will discuss [on Tuesday] because until now they are not admitting there is abuse, and [yet] they allocated an amount for a related study but under salaries.

“So will they be recruiting people who will receive salaries and they will solve the problem of violence? When the ministry is not convinced in the first place that there is violence?”

He said that the Human Rights Committee had studied the issue, and included social courts, sheltering centres, the elderly and classified the types of abuse.

“We explored it a lot, and we accomplished 80 per cent of it.”

In general, the 2016 draft law did not receive many comments from the committee, as compared with that of 2015; “there were a lot of comments made on that”.

Other issues flagged by the committee included a draft law for all nationals to acquire health insurance, and to allow co-ops to open branches in different emirates.

Mr Jassim said that the issue of introducing value added tax across the GCC was still “under study ... and has not been finished at this stage”.

The child rights draft law has been passed back to the FNC by the President, who made several changes to an article. The members will discuss the article during today’s session. Mr Jasem said that the change was minor and mainly linguistic.