THE director of the Fiji Council of Social Services (FCOSS), Vani Catanasiga has called on Government to ensure the National Budget remains focused on the needs of ordinary Fijians rather than political interests as the country heads towards the next general election.
Speaking during an interview on The Fiji Times’ online portal, The Lens@177, Ms Catanasiga said public finance should be used to improve people’s lives and address pressing social challenges.
“As always, of course it’s about ensuring that the budget is based on the needs of people,” she said.
She warned that politics often worsened existing hardships and should not influence the allocation of public funds.
“Politics is often a dynamic that distorts and further exacerbates the vulnerabilities that exist. It must never be a tool for politics.”
She said FCOSS had observed continuing challenges in critical sectors such as health and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), with some communities still lacking access to reliable water supplies.
“For us at FCOSS, in our work in the last few years, we’ve seen two constant patterns to do with health and wash. These are areas that badly need some accelerated action. There are communities we go to and they don’t have water.
“Some of them have pipes, they have piping and all of that, they don’t have any water flowing through.”
Ms Catanasiga said FCOSS had worked with the United Nations Development Programme and the Pacific Islands Association of NGOs on a People-Centered Public Finance Management System initiative aimed at ensuring government spending directly benefited citizens.
“We wanted to ensure that public finance management is absolutely a tool for citizens’ improvement of their lives and our well-being.”
She also expressed concern that election-year spending could be used to gain political advantage.
“The creation of new portfolios, new programs. And I’m very wary that going into elections, we might increasingly see cases of budget allocations being used for that.
“So I want to warn against that, because it is going to increase the vulnerabilities that already exist.”
Ms Catanasiga said Fiji should be prepared for the impacts of a predicted super El Nino event.
“We’ve got super El Nino, scientists have shared that we should expect the effects of the super El Nino impacting us.
“So if there are gaps in the services that we are delivering to frontline communities, now is the time to really strengthen our systems so that they don’t continue to leave out major populations in rural and remote areas.”
