Govt eyes district authorities

 By GABRIEL LAHOC

DISTRICT development authorities may soon replace the joint district planning and budget priority committees, according to Chief Secretary Manasupe Zurenuoc.

He said the National Executive Council had approved drafting instructions to make it into a proposed law to be presented to parliament.

“The idea now is to bring back the district development authority (DDA) which will basically assume the roles and responsibilities of the current joint district planning and budget priority committee (JDP&BPC) which are basically budgeting and planning for a district.

“However, by practice, they have also gone into the aspects implementation which is not their function,” Zurenuoc said when opening the National Fiscal and Economic Commission workshop in Lae yesterday.

He said apart from the DDA assuming the same powers as the JDP&BPC, it would also be empowered to implement projects which included employing personnel to carry out their programmes with the district administrator as the chief executive officer.

“The idea is for the districts to have their implementation vehicle and the other aspect is to have the district administrator in charge and have control of all the staffing arrangements, they can set up companies to do constructions, they can engage and employ engineers.”

Zurenuoc said currently the district administrators have lost their powers of implementation in the JDP&BPC.

He said MPs would still be the chairmen of the DDA with local level government presidents and ward councillors as members of the authority.

He added that government funding was available but districts currently did not have the capacity to spend the money.

“As you know this year the government has dished out K1.4 billion in terms of development funds directly into the provinces, districts and local level governments, one of the important areas of concern here in the districts is the capacity to implement programs and projects,” he said.

Zurenuoc said decentralisation of public servants into the districts and local level governments would happen in line with that development.