Financial review timely

ON Nov 24, 2014 Parliament created another political entity in its continuing efforts to improve goods and services delivery.
It called this new beast the District Development Authority (DDA) and placed at the feet of this untested entity such powers and responsibilities that basically usurped much of the powers of the Provincial and Local Government system of Government.
Yet these two previous bodies are allowed to coexist primarily because they are creatures of the Constitution (Organic Law on provincial and local level governments and no ordinary Act of Parliament can usurp or nullify a Constitutional Law.
The fact of their coexistence presents no small amount of problems, especially at the coordination, procurement, and command levels.
This law for the first time inserted the politician directly into the command, control, procurement and supply line of the goods and services delivery process.
Hitherto, the politician was a figurehead, a policy maker who directed the flow of policy and programme from a distance, an interested party who was hands-off in the work of the public servant.
The DDA Act made the Member of Parliament for each Open Electorate the head of the operation at the district level, as chairman of the authority, no less.
The DDA was the brainchild of former prime minister, at the time, Peter O’Neill and his chief secretary, Sir Manasupe Zurenuoc (now deceased).
It grew out of the general frustration at the lack of goods and services delivery at the district level.
Such frustrations had led first to the abandonment of the Organic Law on provincial and local level government in 1995 at its 19th year of operation.
The replacement, the Organic Law on provincial and local level governments, is itself, after an equal number of years, found to be an unwieldy and half-baked piece of law that required so many amendments across the years, it is hardly recognisable in its original form.
Further, it created a disturbance in the cohesion of national and sub-national legal arrangements by creating an unelected legislature at the provincial level with only one elected member as its head called the governor, effectively making him assume total powers as head of both the executive and the legislature at this important second tier government.
The sum of this is that the DDA was the second creature summoned into being by the National Parliament that was well intentioned but which also caused a serious aberration to the legal and administrative structure in place in the country.
It has become so that yet another review has been called into this reformed level of government and how organisations such as DDA and provincial health authorities (PHA) sit and relate to each other.
At the heart of such reviews is the matter of this is the intergovernmental financing arrangements.
This week in Lae there begins a workshop series that seeks to review the intergovernmental financing arrangements.
Organised by the National Economic and Fiscal Commission and Treasury no less than 12 other organisations are involved in this review.
Every provincial government, DDA and PHA managers have been invited.
When the woohoo series has travelled to all four regions and heard from all, the NEFC plans to put a report of its findings for the Government to determine outcomes.
It is hoped the report can guide the Government in its deliberations on the provincial and local level governments as well as the greater move to review the national structure and arrangements in place.