The chairperson of the ||Kharas Regional Council, Joseph Isaaks said while Government has made great strides in decentralising directorates to regions, the devolution process needs to be sped up.

Isaaks whilst speaking at the regional consultative meeting for the Africa Peer Review Mechanism National Governance Report in Namibia here on Tuesday, noted that the devolution process includes the decentralisation of functions and funds for particular directorates. Namibia’s Decentralisation Policy was adopted in 1997.

“We need funds at regional level, even my office or the governor’s office has no funds to cover social issues for our people in case someone needs a coffin to bury their loved ones or so. We also pressure our administrators to get those funds, but from which budget?” he said.

He added: “We inherited this system when we came in office, when we were outside we thought when we go in we will get a N.dollars 400 million budget, each region, and then we can do whatever we want, repair boreholes, build schools and others, but that is not the case.”

Isaaks stressed that even the budget proposal that administrators send is not sufficient and at times, the budget is also cut.

“People say councillors are not doing what they were voted for but we do not have resources, how can one then do what they are supposed to do?” he said.

||Kharas Regional Council Chief Regional Officer, Benedictus Diergaardt said that when ministries or directorates are decentralised with funding it makes service delivery to communities much easier.

“When funds are not decentralised small things such as repairing a vehicle takes up to a month because approval has to come from head office, while for another directorate that has funds it takes a week. Decentralisation has to be done with function and funds. On the issue of corruption we focus so much on the public service and forget that at the private sector there is corruption, for example an individual can buy a tyre for N.dollars 1 000, however when Government asks for quotations from the same business that tyre will be N.dollars 1 500,” he said.

Those in attendance were traditional authority representatives, church leaders, youth activists, private sector representatives, politicians and heads of Government institutions.

The regional consultative meetings aim to solicit stakeholders’ input to be used to develop a national governance report.

Source: Namibia Press Agency