Gore justifies budget

 By HELEN TARAWA 
Sohe District Development Authority (DDA) has followed National Forest Authority (NFA) guidelines to budget its log export levy to restore much-needed services, says Sohe MP and Youth, Religion and Community Development Minister Delilah Gore.
She told The National that the projects were budgeted according to the needs of run-down facilities in the Tamata local level government (LLG).
“This budget is not done outside of Tamata LLG. We want to quickly do interventions to restore the health centre and many other facilities that are run-down,” Gore said.
“When NFA allocated the log export levy to Sohe DDA, they also gave us guidelines for the DDA to follow in doing the budget.
“As chairperson, I did not go outside of the guidelines of the budget. Tamata LLG is one that hasn’t seen any development for the last 40 years since independence.
“We have to immediately restore services that have been run down for many years which are within the guidelines of NFA.”
Gore’s comments followed claims by Binandere landowners that they had not been receiving benefits from the K800,000 log export development levy.
Spokesperson Lionel Kobara said by law, 60 per cent of the export levy was supposed to be given to the landowners in the form of social and infrastructure development in the area but they had not seen that in the last 10 years.
Kobara said they were questioning the disbursement of these funds because he claimed they had information on how the funds were spent by the DDA.
Gore said the DDA budget was focused on Tamata LLG because logging was taking place in that area.
“We did the budget according to the needs and the run-down facilities in Tamata LLG,” she said.
“There are other projects that we have budgeted for including Ioma Health Centre.”
Gore insisted that the budget was on aimed development.