BY SAMIE WAIKORI
AUKI
THE Malaita Provincial Government is calling on the national government to consider improvement of its resource sharing to the provinces.
Provincial Secretary of MPG, Mr Jackson Gege made the statement saying this is the reason provinces are sometimes engaged in unethical actions.
He said all the provinces in the country are very marginalise in terms of resources sharing and focus of the national government.
Gege said national government doesn’t see provincial governments as important political institutions to work along for development and delivery of services in the country.
“A clear example was out of the total budget of the national government in terms of resource sharing, all provinces only receive 1.4 percent of the budget.
“And distributing that 1.4 percent among all the provinces, it doesn’t enough to meet all the services and demands in the provinces.
“Because majority of country’s populations are in the provinces and take care by the province.
“So the people’s immediate needs are closer to the provincial government than the national government,” he said.
Gege said the sad thing was it is difficult to meet their services. With the increased population, the need for services and cost of delivery is also increasing.
He said the support by the national government to provincial governments was fixed and not improving year by year.
He said this is one of provincial governments appeal to national government to consider improving resource sharing, so that provinces can increase their responsibility.
“On the other hand, it will also stop provinces from borrowing.
“Because when provinces are not well supported, some of its actions will not seem right in order to meet its legal obligations,” Gege said.
He made an example saying in a clinic, it is unethical to inject two or three patients with only a syringe, but due to luck of syringes and for the sake of serving the patient’s life, the nurses do something unethical.
“This is a classic example of how provincial governments are functioning. They want to do more current services, but they luck resources.
“Although they’re operating on local revenue, but collecting revenue is not easy as it’s costly on areas like logistic, recruitment and others.
“So it’s best for national government to reconsider these things so that provinces do not engage in unethical actions,” Gege said.
It was only yesterday, the Ministry of Provincial Government and Institutional Strengthening (MPGIS) spoke of their priority area to the Public Accounts Committee for a shared resource scheme for provinces.
MPGIS is tasked to strategise for this scheme.
