State to cut election funds

 By MALUM NALU

Chief Secretary Isaac Lupari says one of his most pressing tasks is to reduce costs for the 2017 general elections after these ballooned to over K700 million in 2012. 

He told The National yesterday that there was no reason for election costs to be so high for a relatively-small voting population of only six million. Lupari said the election steering committee would be revived with himself as chairman to get the house in order for 2017.

“We have seven to eight million people (population). Of that, I would reckon that the voters are only about six million,” he said.

“It costs us over K700 million on average to conduct elections in this country. Something’s wrong somewhere. We’re spending so much money.

“The reports that I’ve got shows that we don’t have proper management of provision of services.

“Every little boy is making decisions on expenditure – hiring cars, hiring choppers, printing things. There’s no proper coordination.

“We are still caught up with bills from the last elections in 2012. Bills running into hundreds of millions of kina. We are making some people very rich because there is no proper management of the expenditure for the elections.”

Lupari said he recently met with Electoral Commissioner Patilias Gamato to discuss austerity measures relating to the 2017 elections.

“We need to coordinate with and give him (Gamato) the support he needs,” he said. 

“We need to make sure that we have a good system in place to procure all these services, in compliance with the Finance Management Act.”

Lupari said the need for “fair and just elections” was paramount, hence, the revival of the election steering committee which he would chair.

Prime Minister Peter O’Neill said recently the cost of conducting elections in the country was very high.

He said this when asked to comment on funding for the 2017 general elections after said it needed K192 million this year to prepare, but had only been given K10 million.

 “A country of eight million people cannot afford to spend over half a billion kina on every election. That is unheard of in the democratic world. We need to think of a smarter way to deliver a free and fair election, on time, and all these cost overruns need to stop,” O’Neill said.