Fourth tier of government

NATION

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
OUR conversation has been long-winded and varied on decentralisation.
It has been wandering and disjointed in places, discordant and discouraging in parts and keen and sprightly in other areas across in this space.
That is as it should be for it reflects the subject under examination and reflects our national experience with it across the years since 1975.
It has not been an easy road, this one, and following a reform in 1995 and an adjustment in 2014, we are not yet out of the swamps with another reform proposal before the new Parliament and the way ahead quite unclear.
Autonomy
This has been further complicated by the granting of autonomy to one province, North Solomons, and now by that same Autonomous Region of Bougainville, having voted by a 97 per cent majority in 2019, pressing for outright Independence. That vote, three years on, also remains an undetermined matter for the incoming Parliament to deal with.
Several more provinces are agitating for autonomy status and with our first experience with that form of government on AROB, nobody wants to touch the subject, understandably.
But touch it we must, for there can be no turning back.
We must persevere for there is no going back to a unitary, centralised form of government. Centralised government was already rejected at the constitution planning stage and while the executive government grew cold feet on the last day of adoption of the National Constitution on August 15, 1975 and dropped the entire Section 10 proposing provincial governments, the tumult over the next six months most decidedly bore out the people’s desires and before a year was out that section was back in the first amendment to the constitution.
Citizens have now tasted naked political power at provincial, districts and wards level and however the legal and administrative arrangements and the implementation of them have been, the desire is permanent and widespread to wield political power as a means to determine one’s own future.
Future of decentralisation
It is therefore expedient that rational discussions be held on the form and nature of devolved government in the country to assist with what future form decentralised government is going to take or even if change is required at all.
Experience ought to guide us in deciding what the nature or form of devolved government ought to be. This will in turn guide the legal and administrative frame work and the implementation agenda.
We have been guided further in our conversation in the last few pieces by contributions from speakers at a Conference on Decentralisation organised by the National Research Institute in February. The NRI has a running program on Autonomy and Decentralisation to also encourage informed national conversation on the subject.
Father of Decentralisation Dr John Momis spoke most eloquently on the subject closest to his heart and we have run his speech in full in three parts here.
The last three pieces were aided by the keynote paper presentation by two distinguished leaders on this subject, Professor Cheryl Saunders and Dr Anna Dziedzic, from the Constitution Transformation Network Melbourne Law School.
We promised to continue this week on the division between legislative and executive power, the fragmented funding between levels of governments and how division of power affects the quality of governance and service delivery but we must beg the reader’s patience to divert slightly off course to discuss the district development authorities (DDA). This form of government, hanging onto the lapels of the decentralised government today, could itself be described as an unintended fourth tier government level in PNG for the attention it gets and the resources it burns.
DDAs and ward committees
This now gets us at the heart of a great misunderstanding in the development of devolved government structures in the country.
To the majority of people there exists only three levels of government in the country – the National, the Provincial; and the Local Level.
Yet by operation and resources distribution, two further institutions have been created along the way under the name of districts which perform some governance and services delivery functions and siphon off quite a bit of resources.
They are the district development authorities (DDA) and the ward development committees (WDC).
To be fair, much concentration is made both in recognition and resource allocation of the DDAs and the WDC exist in name only.
Drs Saunders and Dziedzic point out that the district as a fourth tier government was established with the creation of the joint district planning and budget priorities committees in 1996 in an amendment to the Organic Law on Provincial and Local Level Government. A similar joint provincial planning and budget priorities committee was created within the provincial executive. Each of these committees was headed by the local member of each electorate or district and the regional member or governor headed the provincial committee.
In 2014 the national Government introduced the DDA with the passage of the District Development Authority Act. This extinguished and replaced the joint district planning and budget priorities committee but further strengthened the role of the local member as chair of this body, now with amble and independent source of funding straight out of the national budget through the District Services Improvement Programme. This funding level now sits at K10 million per district per year and K5 million per electorate in a province for the Provincial Services Improvement Programme vested to be distributed by the governor. This particular fund will be the subject of our next conversation.
DDAs also receive allocations under transport, agriculture and health funding for districts.
Statutory authorities
As mentioned previously DDAs are statutory authorities but they have a corporate structure and operate as a business with the MP as chairman of the board.
An observation by Saunders and Dziedzic is pertinent and warrant repetition: “As a result of their position as chairs of the DDA and members fo the provincial governments, national MPs play the key role in allocating funds and controlling the budgets of all other levels of sub-national government. Critics of the system have observed the resulting great potential for – and evidence of – misuse and mismanagement of financial resources for political purposes, exacerbated by the clientelist nature of PNG politics, as funds are spent in political partisan fashion rather than in accordance with ward and local level government development plans.”
Remember that the MP approves the National Budget in Parliament and a few as Ministers in Cabinet actually design the budget so that the parliamentarian is now controlling the budget at all levels of government from national to the districts.
If the process is corruptive or corrupted along the way, it is now virtually impossible to get any oversight on it or arrest it because the entire process through every level of government is controlled by the 111 MPs – soon to be 118 following the 2022 elections and by 2027, 124.
By the same token funds allocated through this conduit can only
increase because those approving any increases and those spending it are the same individuals.
So the DDAs now hover somewhere between the Provincial Government and the Local Level Government levels.
There are 89 DDAs representing each Open electorate in the country as against 396 Local Level Governments. Each LLG is now required to make project submissions to DDA but there is no requirement under the law or anywhere else for the latter to acquiesce to the request.
Billions spent by politicians
By the same token, each WDC can make its submission for projects under the same conditions.
The national budget at present time approves each year K890 million under the DSIP (89 electorates at K10 million each); K445 million in PSIP (K5 million per electorate for provinces) and K198 million in LLGSIP (K0.5 million each for 396 LLGs). A total K1.53 billion of the national Budget is expended through this programme.
Across one term of Parliament, if these funds are religiously allocated yearly, a whopping K7.65 billion is spent by politicians.
If the money is spent as it should be there ought to be shining new projects everywhere in the country today.
Worse, these funds are aimed at exactly the same populations with no discernible note anywhere in evidence that this is so or coordination as to how or where the funds are spent. Notice here that the Provincial Services Improvement Program (PSIP) is awarded at K5 million for every electorate in a province when each electorate is covered by the DSIP at K10 million each. The DSIP covers every LLG in the country and yet each LLG is awarded its own K0.5 million.
In truth then every one of the 89 electorates or districts in the country is allocated K15.5 million a year under these various guises.
Do the districts actually see K15.5 million is the million-kina question that requires answering.
For it is a useless exercise to continue to fritter away at the form and structure of a devolved government system in the name of goods and services delivery and to allocate more and more resources towards such a system if the delivery is not happening whatever system is in place.
Perhaps, and this is a serious issue for consideration, it is not the system but the man that requires major adjustment.