Leadership Accountability, Budget and Financial Management Performance and National Security

Abstract

The primary responsibility of government is to ensure the security of lives and property, law and order in a society collectively described as national security in this paper. Using a twelve-year timeseries data from 2005 to 2016, national security indicators were regressed on leadership accountability and budget and financial management performance. The result confirms that leadership accountability plays a role in enhancing national security in line with the theory of accountability. Leadership accountability was also found to improve resource utilization through the moderation of procedural behavior in the utilization of military expenditure. Similarly, increases in budget and financial management performance was found to lead to a reduction in threats to national security while the reduction in national security resource utilization and the resultant savings led to improvement in national security through increases in budgetary allocation to other poverty reducing sectors. Appropriate policy frameworks to encourage leadership accountability and budget and financial management performance through identifiability, monitoring and evaluation should be reinforced to enhance national security.