East Sepik lags behind on service delivery

EAST Sepik province is far behind the rest of the country in terms of service delivery to its people.
A four-year assessment in 2005-08, carried out by the National Economic and Fiscal Commission, showed that a very low percentage of national government grants were actually spent on service delivery.
The rest of the money was used to fund administrative components such as hire cars, travel and accommodation and staff cost. A mere 5% of internal revenue was spent on service delivery while a whopping 95% was spent on administrative components.
East Sepik provincial government is not spending money on basic services critical to the well being of the people.
This reveals how miserable we are doing, and how far we are to supporting the medium-term development strategy priority sectors of health, education, agriculture and infrastructure maintenance.
Our transport infrastructure such as roads and bridges needed to be maintained and upgraded. We need a road network that is maintained and that enables the flow of people and produce. Roads that are regularly maintained were not being maintained and left to get worse.
Every year the national government gives millions of kina in grants to the provincial government to provide basic services to the people.
The government allocates a substantial amount of these funds to the priority areas of basic education, rural health and transport infrastructure maintenance through these grants, yet our indicators are really poor and way off the track.
We have a very colourful provincial development plan that has been a cut-and-paste work by a bunch of so-called planners. On paper it looks good but is it realistic? Can it be implemented successfully within the given time frame? Only time will tell.
Our provincial administration has lost focus on its roles and responsibilities and is heavily politicised and entangled in Waigani politics.
Public servants are regularly making endless trips to capture the bright lights of Port Moresby while their rural folks are crying out for basic goods and services.
Our public servants in the districts and LLG’s have also lost focus on carrying out their roles and responsibilities.
On government pay week, rural public servants can be seen flocking into Wewak by the truckload, leaving their work place unattended for days and up to weeks.
If this trend continues, we will have a very big problem in catching up with the rest of the country in terms of delivering basic goods and services to the MTDS priority sectors of health, education, agriculture and transport infrastructure maintenance.

Fed-up
Wewak