Okole: Pay councillors on time

Councillors must be paid their monthly allowances on time to allow government services to reach ward level, an academic said.
Senior fellow researcher with the National Research Institute, Dr Henry Okole highlighted this yesterday in Kokopo, East New Britain during an election awareness.
He was commenting on concerns raised that councillors nationwide were not getting paid their allowances on time.
“If you look at the system of government, people expect the system to work down to the LLG level. And if you do not motivate people or cater for their needs, is it any wonder why many provincial governments are not functioning well?”
He said in ENB, most of the provincial administration manpower had been shifted to the LLG levels as they had a heart for the people.
But one could not necessarily count on that for people to do a good job.
“These people have their families’ welfare to cater for and this is important for the next government to look into and address.”
Acting registrar Political Parties and Candidates Dr Alphonse Gelu said the issue of unpaid councillors was of great concern as councillors were leaders who lived within the communities.
He said action on this could only be taken at the national level and not at the provincial level.
“The provincial administration should not be blamed and the irony of this is that you cannot make sense out of it.
“Now open members are using councillors to campaign for them and when they get to parliament, they seem to forget about their councillors.”
Gelu said this was one of those most pressing issues, and councillors needed to be paid on time and not miss out for four to five fortnights while at the national level, politicians were enjoying perks and privileges.
He said that this was an ongoing issue and would continue.
“This is a sad case of an elected group of people in PNG that have been forgotten and not
compensated for their hard efforts at the village and ward levels.”
“In that sense we can say government can take this up but somebody just has to have the will to do so.”