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Herald Reporter
THE distribution of devolution funds to local authorities is determined by each area’s population, the depth of poverty and the scarcity of social facilities such as education and healthcare, and the state of infrastructure such as roads, legislators heard yesterday.
Local Government and Public Works Minister July Moyo said while central Government might not want to be seen interfering with local authorities, there was monitoring through the Ministers of State and Devolution, Provincial Development Coordinators and other structures.
Minister Moyo was speaking in the National Assembly while fielding questions from backbenchers, who had raised concern on the manner in which local authorities were prioritising what they did with the money.
“Devolution funds are given to local authorities on the basis of population and availability of social amenities such as water and sewage reticulation among other issues, and the money is distributed on a pro-rata basis,” said Minister Moyo.
While it was critical to note that these local authorities enjoyed some autonomy in deciding distribution of the money, there was some mechanism to ensure monitoring.
“We have asked local authorities to pay attention to those areas with no social amenities like health and education facilities. We cannot sit in all these councils to see how they are doing it. We however have the Ministers of State and Provincial Development Co-ordinators to assist us in providing remedial action. We cannot be everywhere otherwise it will defeat the essence of devolution,” said Minister Moyo.
Last month, Minister Moyo said local authorities had started receiving their devolution funds from central Government for locally-planned development.
Government was in the process of fine-tuning the Constitution to speed up the decentralisation process and to sort out the taxation and administrative powers in the provinces and districts to make devolution work properly.
In fulfilment of the devolution agenda, Government will appoint technocrats to spearhead the process under the five-year National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1), which will replace the Transitional Stabilisation Programme at the end of the year.
The appointment of the experts to give technical guidance to Ministers of Provincial Affairs and Provincial Development Coordinators is part of efforts to attain an Upper Middle Income economy by 2030.
The Public Service Commission (PSC) is in the process of identifying and deploying director level personnel to attend to provincial governance issues under NDS1 which will run from 2021 to 2025.
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