Form new govt to fix budget leakages

Letters

THERE has been an uncontrolled government spending by nearly all state institutions on unnecessary goods and services for the last two years.
This was deliberately done to beat the monthly and annual government budget cycle to empty the last kina before the close of accounts.
This bad culture crept into the public finance system when the then finance minister James Marape decided to raid and freeze all government trust accounts totaling billions of kina dead funds intended for ongoing projects by 2017.
There was nothing tangible to show for with all the billions of kina worth of cheques printed out in the last two years.
Most projects had an average of three years life span for completion.
Options to front load payments in one year for delivery according to scope has been a failure with incomplete projects.
Others have misapplied funds to buy expensive fleet of vehicles for political cronies amounting to double dipping.
Others failed to utilise qualified staff on payroll to hire outdated cronies as fake consultants to prepare one-page expensive letters in a month for K30,000.
This is among many hilarious things happening in the Government’s financial leakage system.
The funding buffer with project trust accounts is no longer there and all existing and new projects are competing in the same fiscal year for funds.
That is a bad panacea for a looming debt crises if no new investments in major economic projects across all sectors take place sooner.
A new government has to be formed soon to correct all budgetary leakage into conspicuous consumption rather than short to long term public investments.

Observer, NCD