PM outlines key issues for minister

By JEFFREY ELAPA
PRIME Minister James Marape has directed the Public Service Minister Wesley Nukundj to make sure one employee had one-position and one pay, avoiding duplication.
This way, he hoped, the cost of public service salary would be no more than the necessary amount.
The prime minister also directed the minister to make sure the government policy of making the districts and local level governments (LLG) focus on service delivery by deploying all public servants to districts must be implimented.
The directive was to look at the right sizing of the public service structure and moving service delivery from Waigani to districts and LLGs.
Marape wants Nukundj to consolidate the payroll with the one-person, one-position, one-pay policy so that the budget blowout experienced year after year was addressed.
He said the government paid K160 million in salaries every fortnight and many of them were bogus claims and that needed to be tightened up.
Nukundj said he wanted to see best standard of service delivery established during his term in office and among them was to have about 70 per cent of the public service in the country based in districts and LLGs.
He said he was determined to concentrate on the government’s focus of empowering the subnational level by moving all the public servants to the district and LLGs while Waigani maintained only skeletal staff to perform oversight, supervisory and advisory functions.
Nukundj said the 119,962 public servants in the country consumed about K3.4 billion, about one third of the country’s national budget.
About 6,070 public servants in the country are unattached, Nukundj said, and they consumed K260 million every year sitting around doing nothing and he would make sure to resize and restructure the public service.