Africa-Press – Tanzania. THE government has smelt a rat in the implementation of health projects, a situation that has prompted Minister for Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children, Dr Doroth Gwajima to call for evaluation of all tasks across the country.
The Minister was forced to issue the order this week after learning that most projects that involve construction of hospitals are incomplete, with the allocated budget already exhausted.
Dr Gwajima called for conducting an evaluation after she carried out a brief survey on projects being implemented in various parts of the country, including the construction of Geita Referral Hospital, during which she noted that most of the tasks were yet to be completed while funds allocated are already spent.
She directed the order to Tanzania Building Agency (TBA), a task that the Agency must involve Regional Medical Officers (RMOs), where she warned that the evaluation report should be on her table as soon as possible.
“According to the brief survey that I have so far carried out since I assumed the role of the minister, is that there are some weaknesses in supervision of implementation of health projects, including spending of funds. Many projects consume money beyond the set budgets,” affirmed the minister.
Citing the construction of Geita Referral Hospital, the minister said despite President John Magufuli dishing out 5bn/- for the task, the project is yet to be completed, with the contractor demanding an extra 2bn/-.
“It is of paramount importance to engage different type of experts in these projects so that the funds allocated can be spent as per plan. There should be transparency on expenditures made. We should also know if more funds are needed and why. It confuses when we find a certain project being incomplete but its budget already exhausted, and worse still, the contractor asks for more money which is almost 50 per cent of the first exhausted budget,” complained the minister.
According to the minister, engaging unprofessional individuals in implementation of projects might be the reason behind failure by contractors to complete projects and variation of costs that occurs.
“If these problems have nothing to do with engagement of unprofessional individuals, then the project supervisors might be deliberately creating barriers for the governments to achieve its development goals,” she said.
The Regional TBA Controller, Engineer Glory Akyoo said the Agency will quickly respond on the minister’s directives, but clarified that the idea of requesting for additional funds for implementation of Geita Regional Referral Hospital emanated from the ministry’s experts.
On the other side, Dr Gwajima issued a-30-day ultimatum to Geita RMO for completion of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) building so as to avoid babies overcrowding in the available wards.
The RMO, Dr Japhert Simeo promised to work on the directive, clarifying that delay in the building was due to lack of 5m/- , but already the hospital sent a fund release proposal to the District Administrative Secretary.
