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{
    "id": 250719,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/250719/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 251,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Mr. Balala",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 9,
        "legal_name": "Najib Mohamed Balala",
        "slug": "najib-balala"
    },
    "content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to support the idea of the Ninth Parliament, of coming up with the Constituencies Development Fund (CDF). The CDF is the only institution that has shaken all the corners of this country. I want to highly commend the Chairman for the work he has done and particularly, in raising the allocations from 2.5 per cent to 7.5 per cent. I do not agree with my colleague, Mr. Billow, when he says that we should reduce it to 5 per cent. Some of the funds which reach our constituencies are minimal, for some peculiar reasons. When we carried out the 1999 Census, the results were tampered with and some of our constituencies were not considered as populous. They were also under-estimated in terms of numbers and poverty index. The only projects which are vibrant, exist and compete with the Government, are the CDF projects. The danger in that is that, there is a lot of duplication when a constituency is under a municipality. The councils or municipalities duplicate exactly the same projects the CDF committee has agreed upon. That is where we need some clarity. I do not know at what level we can get some sanity between the CDF committees and the councils, so that rather than compete, they complement each other. We thought the idea of the District Projects Committees (DPCs) should do that job. However, the job of the DPC is not only to reject projects of the CDF committee, but also to understand the financial contributions of CDF in various regions. I think it is very important to institutionalise CDF. I do not agree that the Fund should be moved to the Ministry of Regional Development Authorities. I believe that we should either have an independent authority to handle CDF issues or the Ministry of Finance creates a section to handle CDF, so that there is efficiency and easy decision-making by the Minister. I think by turning CDF into another Ministry, considering the bureaucracy involved, would cause a lot of problems. Apart from creating a national secretariat which is highly commendable, in the national level, we need to strengthen the secretariat in the constituency level. We will now be handling a lot of money, but we do not have the staff and capacity to handle it. It is good to appoint a coordinator. However, having one coordinator with 25 projects to handle, is not impossible. The figure of 3 per cent for administration purposes is very small. I think it should be abolished and left to the committee to agree that maybe, it should not go beyond 10 per cent. That way, we will employ more qualified staff to handle the money and have good equipment. I am not talking about graders or motor-vehicles because I know the maintenance costs are high. I am"
}