Kolitagane: Budget cut not an excuse
THE $20m reduction in the Agriculture Ministry’s allocation in the 2019/2020 budget cannot be used to justify poor service delivery and implementation.
This was the message from Agriculture Ministry permanent secretary David Kolitagane to senior ministry officials at the ministry’s Strategic Development Plan and Costed Operation Plan workshop in Nadi yesterday.
He said the ministry had –– over the past five years –– under spent its budget by between $10m and $15m annually.
“As you are all aware that there has been a marked reduction in our budget by about $20m,” he said.
“But if you think deeply on the operations of the ministry, we cannot use this budget cut as an excuse to benchmark low delivery and low execution in the next financial year.
“Why? Because I know we always underspend our budget –– over the past five years we always consistently underspend our budget, we don’t normally spend around $10m to $15m of our budget on average for the past years.”
Mr Kolitagane added that the ministry had to work smarter with the resources it had without compromising on service delivery.
“We just received about $5m worth of heavy equipment –– tractors, digger, trucks and grader –– adding a very big asset base to support the ministry’s operation.
“We just need to work smarter with current resources we have including other partner ministries and donors who are providing free technical advisory to the Agriculture Ministry.
“SEG (standard expenditure group) one and SEG two has been reduced by five per cent or two million dollars.
“With these budget cuts, the ministry must continue to perform and must deliver its objectives set out in the SDP (strategic development plan).
“We must work smarter using better systems and processes.”