IT has been established that lack of transparency in the local government operation is done deliberately in order to cheat on their expenditures according to a recent survey.June 2010
By Elias Mhegera
Speaking during the Policy Forum debate at the British Council on Friday last week, Marcossy Albanie from the Policy Forum said councilors and other relevant authorities do not like to operate transparently in order to avoid audit queries.
The theme of the debate was; The Problems of Transparency within Local Governments: Complex Issues or Simple Lack of Will? Two presentations were done in the debate.
Albanie says that power holders do not want to be answerable to their subjects because this will make them submissive to their subjects, a thing that they are not prepared to do. He was presenting a paper titled “Accessibility to Information and its Impacts to Local Government Authorities (LGAs).
He says that during the surveys that were conducted by different NGOs under the Public Expenditure Tracking System (PET), it was found that there are a lot of loopholes for resource mismanagement.
“There is poor community ownership, lack of involvement by the local communities, and difficulties in implementing plans and oversights, however there are little officials incentive to account for,” says Albanie.
Elaborating with vivid example Albanie said that in the 2007/2008 budget the Babati Council spent 396.6 millions more than what was allocated in its budget.
He cited another council which made misappropriation of funds through double allocation is Kibaha where there were double allocations of funds for health and community development departments to execute HIV/Aids activities.
Ms Esther Msuya from the Research on Poverty Alleviation, REPOA said that there is a big challenge in coordinating data and reports from the top to the grass root level. She was presenting a paper titled “Challenges in data collection, consolidation and reporting for local government authorities in Tanzania,”
“Elaborating on the challenges she said “…there are serious challenges in data desegregation, availability, quality of data and timeliness,” She cited the main problems as being in the ward education level, primary schools, and health centres.
Msuya said there are complications in getting data from one level to another due to lack of institutional capacity, lack of qualified personnel, lack of software for data manual transferring, and lack of statisticians.
She elaborated that due to lack of funding there late disbursement which in turn causes late reporting of financial reports. Moreover she attributes these complications to duplication in some cases due to poor harmonization of financial reports.
Msuya says that lack of modern technology in some areas is a discrepancy. For instance in some local government authorities there are worn out computers, there are no electronic data storage facilities and the internet facility.
She added that in some areas there are no follow ups due to poor infrastructure, poor transportation and lack of funds to support data coordination process.
Moreover she highlighted that another serious challenge is lack of training and reliable electronic network to transfer data. However there are no systems to check quality of data and follow up mechanisms.
She suggested the need of improving human resources namely; staff numbers particularly statisticians and to enhance their training. She also suggests allocation of enough funds in order to monitor properly and maintain quality assurance.
Msuys suggests availability of feedback system through information technology in order to monitor software analyses and transferring of data. This should go hand in hand with provision of modern equipment to manage properly quantity and quality.
Contributing to the debate Habraham Shamumoyo who is the secretary general of Association of Local Authorities Tanzania (ALAT) said that there is a need for a through advocacy and lobbying.
This is in order to make people in the local government areas to understand their rights, privileges so as to demand power transfer from the authorities to the local people.
“The lack of information is caused deliberately because some LGAs functionaries prefer to hide information so that they can get allowances when travelling to research or present reports in the area falling in their jurisdiction,” said Shamumoyo.
Rukonge Anatoly a participant in the debate said the LGAs and the Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), are in a constant state of witch hunt which make the former to hide information which they deem could jeopardize their positions.
“The issues of hiding information is a social enigma, it is a sign of irresponsibility and ill motives in expenditure in many sectors; the government, NGOs, LGAs etc,” he said.
The non disclosure of sources of funds and their expenditures causes delays in implementation of projects, while a good number of these delays are caused by lack of commitments by some functionaries.
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