New Ireland takes on funding woes

THE National Budget is in deficit and the provinces can not depend on the Government to meet its obligations, New Ireland deputy governor for finance Misbil Nelson says.
“We have a real job ahead of us. We need to be smart. We need to admit there is a problem and design a way to deal with it,” he said.
Nelson said this during the presentation of New Ireland’s 2020 Budget on Wednesday.
He said they had been dealing with the problem in two ways:

• To become more independent in revenue and expenditure. Taking control of what is done in province, being autonomous; and,
• The budget is a partnership that gives power to the people to decide what they want to spend money on, to determine their development priorities.

The 2020 provincial budget of K271mil will be shared for social programmes, economic programmes, infrastructure development, administrative costs, finance and planning, other development expenditures such as district services improvement programme funds and recurrent expenditure.