Gazelle seeks avenues to spend

GAZELLE, the biggest district in East New Bri­tain, is looking at ways to use up the funds allocated to it by the national government.
Unless local level go­vernment managers and officers step up, there will be a lot of unspent money by 2017, district administrator Ron Midi said.
Speaking during the budget consultation workshop last Friday, he said over the years the district had seen a huge amount of funds unspent and were carried over to the next year.
Funds, however, were not rolled out or released to provinces on time.
Midi is worried that this would continue unless the capacity of LLG managers and officers was strengthened to implement impact projects.
“If they can’t spend K100,000 a year, how can they spend K500,000 in nine months?”
He said these were the problems he was foreseeing with regards to increased funding from the national government.
“Accountability, audit and LLG inspections must be strengthened with the involvement of provincial headquarters so that we continue to monitor expenditures that are in line with our programmes and the money is going to where it is supposed to go.”
Director for corporate services Ephreddie Jubilee said it would be a challenge for the province to implement this year’s K180,000 million budget in eight to nine months.
This, she said, meant spending K20 to K30 million a month on impact projects which must be done with impact.
This was the first time the province has had a big budget which was a K70 million increase from last year.
Jubilee said with Gazelle being the biggest district, the biggest challenge lay on LLG managers and officers to take the lead but they should have the capacity to do so.
The national economic fiscal commission (NEFC) last year said huge carry-overs affected the province’s rating on the budget scorecard and it was offering ways for provinces to improve spending.