The National | February 3, 2026
THE Government has paid a whopping K1.162 billion last year to provinces and districts in service improvement funds that are under the control of Members of Parliament.
Finance Minister Thomas Opa said yesterday that no district and province had been left out in its Provincial (PSIP) and District Service Improvement Programme (DSIP) allocation of K10 million each.
He said the Finance Department payment records confirmed that it paid out K960 million to the 96 districts and K220 million to the 22 provinces.
This was the record as of December last year.
PSIP funds are paid to the provincial treasury and distributed at the discretion of the governor while DSIPs are paid to district treasuries and distributed by the district development authority, headed by the Open Member as chairman.
In his statement, Opa advised administrators and MPs to ensure that all allocated funding and grants are to be spent in accordance with Governments guidelines.
He said: “The guidelines set by the Government ensures proper acquittals and reporting are remitted for the relevant departments and statutory bodies to monitor compliance and to prevent misuse of public funding. The release of DSIP and PSIP have often been affected by cash flow constraints, administrative delays and competing national priorities, resulting in partial or delayed disbursements.
“These challenges have impacted project implementation and service delivery in many rural and urban communities,” he said.
He said with this full disbursement of funds, no governor or MP should make further noise or accuse the Government of any bias in the allocation of these funds.
The last report on acquittals of public funds in The National dated, Dec 30, 2025, showed poor response by MPs and administrators to ensure that acquittals on public funds were submitted by the sanctioned date of March 31 each year.
A listing from Implementation and Rural development showed that 31 provinces and districts were late to acquit their 2024 funds and indicating that the Auditor-General had no oversight and partially due to lack of capacity in the districts.
A trend in the report shows that outstanding reports for 2018 to 2023 increased slightly over the years, with 2018 pending seven reports, 15 reports in 2019, 20 reports in 2020, 27 reports in 2021, 32 reports in 2022 and 37 in 2023.
According to the report, most of the reason for lack of timely reporting is lack of funding, logistics, newly-formed districts and other administrative matters.
A check yesterday, found most MPs and administrators had received their funds as per the advice issued by the Finance Department.
North Fly MP James Donald said that his district had received full payment but also agreed that payments made at the end of the year indicated poor planning by the Government and could indicate that accountability was weak and therefore open to obvious misuse and corruption.